Development of a new production system for baculovirus pesticides

Insects are major pests of economically important plant-based food and fiber crops and also vector diseases causing millions of human deaths and untold suffering annually. Moreover, our efforts to control insect pests have caused massive environmental contamination and continue to cause human and animal fatalities annually. Biotechnology offers alternatives to conventional pest control that have great promise although, like other technological innovations, there is resistance to its use and it carries some risks with which we have little prior experience. Baculoviruses, which are common pathogens of many important pest insect species causing frequent and dramatic epizootics that produce major declines in pest populations in cropping and landscape systems have been intensively investigated as biological pesticides. However, baculovirus biopesticides, with a few notable exceptions, have not been commercially successful due to high production costs. One increasingly important aspect of biotechnology is its potential to replace conventional products with process and materials that are more environmentally sound. Paratechs biology-based baculovirus production (B3P) technology is an example of such a green process in that it has the potential to produce cost-competitive biopesticides that can be used to replace chemical pesticides and relies upon natural biological processes rather than synthetic chemicals to do so. Such a technology would have important commercial impact and also have beneficial environmental and health effects.