Agrochemical Discovery - Building the Next Generation of Insect Control Agents

An expanding and often upwardly mobile global population requires large improvements in the quantity and quality of food production as well as freedom from the ravages of disease carrying insect vectors. This necessitates that new options and approaches for insect control be developed. Increasing pest resistance to existing insecticides, a changing regulatory landscape, and shifts in pest spectrum due to changes in climate and agronomic practices, including transgenic plants, all present challenges to developing new insect control agents. The agrochemical industry has been developing synthetic organic insecticide solutions to insect pest problems for more than 70 years. Early efforts produced just a few insecticide classes/modes of action (MoA), each with a large number of different active ingredients. More recent industry efforts have been focused on an increasingly diverse array of insecticide classes, most often coupled to new or underexploited MoAs, but with each class having only a few members. A wide range of approaches have been and continue to be employed in the discovery of these more recent commercial offerings as well as the insecticides currently under development. In spite of the decline in the number of agrochemical companies in the US, EU and Asia that are now involved in insecticide discovery, innovative solutions continue to be found. Powered by the availability of new research tools and an increase in the size of many of the remaining agrochemical companies, robust discovery platforms are being built which will provide additional novel insect control products in the future.