Biotech startup Innate Immunity expands to Fort Collins to collaborate with Innosphere Ventures, CSU
Friday October 30, 2020
FORT COLLINS -- Innate Immunity, a four year-old biotechnology startup focused on plant and crop health, has announced an expansion to Colorado as the company will operate out of laboratory and office space in the Innosphere Ventures building.
Innate Immunity is currently based at the New Mexico Consortium Laboratory in Los Alamos. 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, CEO and 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 field trials with CSU, Innate Immunity is also conducting 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 orange production 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 is biotech startup 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 its 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 Miller at [email protected] or 505-310-5711.
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