Innate Immunity, along with its spinoff biotech startup, scale operations in Colorado to focus on diseases affecting plant and crop health
Innate Immunity, a four year-old biotechnology startup focused on plant and crop health, has announced their expansion to Colorado as the company will operate out of laboratory and office space in the Innosphere Ventures building in Fort Collins, CO. Innate Immunity is currently based at the New Mexico Consortium Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Innate is working to combat some of the most devastating bacterial, viral, and fungal diseases affecting cherished crops including grape, citrus, apple, and pear.
“We have collaborative and rich partnerships with leading industry, research and government entities,” said Michelle Miller, co-founder of Innate Immunity. “Expanding our operations to Fort Collins has allowed up to better work with Colorado State University on our infection greenhouse trials.” In addition to their field trials with CSU, Innate Immunity is also actively underway with field trials in New Mexico, Texas, Florida, and California.
“I’m excited to be working with a biotech startup like Innate Immunity because they’re lean, highly-productive, and have a talented business entrepreneur of Michelle Miller scaling the company,” said Ben Walker, Innosphere client manger and director of the NoCoBio Cluster. “We’re excited to have them located at Innosphere, and their co-founders can count on the support of our commercialization program and our bioscience community.”
Innate Immunity has developed a novel chimeric peptide topical plant therapy that is a new approach to clearing plant diseases from the host. As an example, one of Innate Immunity’s products aims to be the long-term solution to Huanglongbing (HLB), which is one of the most destructive diseases of citrus fruits and continues to spread across the globe with rapid infections occurring in Brazil, China, Mexico and the US. In 2019, plant diseases caused the production of oranges to be down 73% and grapefruit production down 89% since 2003. While this is just one crop and plant health issue that Innate Immunity is solving, the company has many products in development that prevent pathogen-induced diseases.
A spinoff company from Innate Immunity, LLC is biotech startup called Immunological Solutions, Inc. that focuses on utilizing the natural human response towards infection as a method to combat antibiotic resistant strains causing disease and chronic illnesses. Next steps for this spinoff company is to complete validation of their therapeutic approach to engineer human-derived new peptides and proteins to treat multiple diseases.
For more information on Innate Immunity or its spinoff startup, Immunological Solutions, contact Michelle Miller, co-founder and CEO at [email protected] or 505-310-5711.
About Innate Immunity:
Innate Immunity is a four year-old biotechnology startup focused on plant and crop health. We are a small, lean and highly productive startup aiming to clear some of the most devastating bacterial, viral, and fungal diseases affecting cherished crops including grape, citrus, apple, and pear. Fundamentally, we work to increase the host’s innate immunity to clear and resist disease. We prevent pathogen-induced diseases with the design of host-derived antibacterial chimeras currently applied for the treatment of grape, citrus, apple, and pear – with other crops in our sights using the same technology.
About Innosphere Ventures:
Innosphere Ventures accelerates the success of science and technology startups and emerging growth companies with office and laboratory facilities, a seed stage venture capital fund, and an exclusive commercialization program.
As Colorado’s leading incubation program and commercialization expert, Innosphere’s program focuses on ensuring companies are investor-ready, connecting founders with experienced advisors and early hires, making introductions to corporate partners, exit planning, and accelerating top line revenue growth. Innosphere has been supporting Colorado startups for over 20 years and is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization with a strong mission to create jobs and grow Colorado’s entrepreneurship ecosystem. www.innosphere.org