Plant Health Care’s peptide product PHC398 gets US EPA approval

Agricultural biological products company Plant Health Care announced on Tuesday that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved its application for the novel peptide product ‘PHC398’.

It said PHC398 is the first active ingredient from its ‘PREtec’ technology platform, approved for registration globally.

The AIM-traded firm said the registration of PHC398 made the process of registering future PREtec products in the United States “quicker and cheaper”.

Plant added that the high-performance variant of PHC398, known as ‘PHC279’, was submitted for EPA approval on 14 May, and was currently expected to be approved in the second half of 2021.

The board described the company’s PREtec peptides as a “novel class of technology” to stimulate a plant to defend itself.

It said PHC279 would be used on a range of row crops, such as corn and soybeans, as well as fruit and vegetable crops, and would be the first of a series of peptides the company intended to commercialise in the next two to three years.

“We are very pleased to have achieved this first registration of a PREtec peptide,” said chief executive officer Chris Richards.

“The EPA's positive review on PHC398 greatly increases the probability that future peptides from the PREtec platform will be registered quickly and at low cost.”

Richards said the first commercial product in line for registration was PHC279, which had generated “strong results” from testing in 2019 in the US and Brazil.

“We are excited about the potential for products based on our PREtec peptides, which are targeting markets valued at $5bn.”