Hey readers,

Thank you for being here! This week we have four stories about how the biologicals sector is reshaping itself. In Brazil, a startup is running a biologicals factory on a contract manufacturing model. A Spain and New Zealand alliance says something specific about where European biotech is heading. Our Strain of the Month is a new Trichoderma strain showing potential against oomycetes. And research from Embrapa shows that capsules could help with the shelf life problem, one of the main reasons some products never reach the field.

Let's dive in.

In 2019, two scientists from one of Latin America's most prestigious agronomy schools left the lab to start a company with one idea: turn Brazil's microbial biodiversity into commercial agricultural products.

Six years later, IdeeLab Biotecnologia has a new industrial biofactory in Cambé, Paraná, partnerships with global names like ICL Group and Ginkgo Bioworks, and technologies in use across an estimated 3.5 million hectares in Brazil.

The interesting part is how the company makes money. IdeeLab does not sell its own products. It works as a contract development and manufacturing partner: a startup or a multinational comes in with an idea, and IdeeLab develops it, registers it, runs the field testing, and manufactures it at industrial scale, handing over the intellectual property at the end.

In an interview with Biologicals Latam, CEO and co-founder Dr. Ronaldo Dalio framed it this way: the company does not keep its own products because it does not want to compete with the clients it serves, so it transfers the technology and lets them handle market development, sales, and support.

The new plant in Cambé represents a roughly $5.8 million USD investment. Initial capacity is 1 million litres of biological inputs per year, with plans to scale to 6 million litres within three years.

Contract development and manufacturing organisations are well established in pharmaceuticals, but the approach has barely been tested in biologicals, and Brazil, with all its microbial biodiversity and a fast-maturing bioinputs market, is a logical place to build it.

The real test is whether the model holds at scale. If it does, a company will no longer need its own factory to put a biological product on the market, and that changes who gets to compete.

Spanish biotech company Veganic, which specialises in fully organic and vegan biostimulants and crop protection products, has signed a strategic alliance with Agrimm, the Australasian leader in Trichoderma-based biological solutions.

Agrimm brings more than 40 years of local knowledge about Australasia, from soil variability to climate extremes. Veganic's entry point is its R&D and its biological technology. Together they are looking to fit those biologicals to the soils and crops of Australia and New Zealand, and to stay with the grower so they know how to use them. It is not just selling a product and walking away.

The deal signals that European biological companies are looking for partners with field presence in regions where they have no local knowledge, pairing international R&D with on-the-ground expertise.

Products that were available in only a handful of markets two years ago are now crossing into new territories, and the partnerships forming now will make these biologicals easier to reach in different countries.

Embrapa research points to encapsulation as a way to extend the shelf life of biological inputs, one of the biggest limitations in biologicals manufacturing.

The researchers encapsulated spores of Trichoderma harzianum in cellulose-based matrices: cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) on their own, and a composite of those nanocrystals with carboxymethyl cellulose (CNC:CMC).

The results after a year in storage were notable!. The encapsulated spores dropped by only one order of magnitude, around tenfold, while the free spores fell by close to a millionfold. The encapsulation worked as a protective barrier that kept the strain alive.

The microorganism resisted heat better, and UV radiation up to a point. Only the CNC:CMC composite protected the spores. The CNC-only matrix, on the other hand, did not protect at all. It gave an even worse result than leaving the spores free, because its more porous structure let more radiation through.

And this was not just about keeping the spores alive, but active: the capsules stored for a year were still able to hold back Fusarium solani, a pathogen that attacks the roots of crops like soybean and tomato. The strain kept its biocontrol activity after all that time in storage.

Encapsulation with specific materials could solve a good part of the formulation problems, which is where many biological inputs get stuck on the way from the laboratory to the field.

Few pathogens have a reputation as bad as Phytophthora infestans. It causes late blight, the same disease that wiped out potato crops and triggered the Great Irish Famine in the nineteenth century, and it remains one of the biggest threats to tomato and potato worldwide. Control still leans heavily on chemical fungicides.

That is why a recent study put a biological alternative to the test: Trichoderma paratroviride strain 8942.

However, one detail adds a little bit of complexity to the case. Phytophthora infestans is not a fungus, it is an oomycete, and its cell wall is made of cellulose rather than chitin.

Trichoderma usually attacks fungi with chitinases, the enzymes that break down chitin, so against an oomycete it needs different tools. That is why its efficacy against this kind of pathogen is barely studied, and a strain that performs well here is a real novelty.

In the Petri dish, strain 8942 was aggressive: it inhibited more than 80% of the pathogen's growth, coiling its hyphae around those of the oomycete to attack it.

The strain's cell-free filtrate and volatile compounds, on their own, each held back more than 70% (on paper it was a strong result).

But in the plant the results were less promising. When the strain was tested on potted tomato plants, the reduction in disease was around 20%, far from the 80% seen in the petri dish. That gap between what shows up in the lab and what happens in the plant is exactly where many promising biocontrol agents fall short, and it is the reason a good in vitro number does not yet mean that there is a product.

What is interesting is that the strain does not only attack the pathogen, it also primes the plant. The study showed that it switches on tomato's defences (more callose in the leaves, higher defence enzyme activity) and stimulates root growth. It works along two paths at once.

For now, 8942 is a laboratory promise, not a product: it still has to be tested in the field. But it opens a barely explored door, using Trichoderma against oomycetes, and that makes the strain genuinely interesting.