Elicit Plant makes C&EN’s list of '10 Start-Ups to Watch'

Elicit Plant, a Sofinnova Partners portfolio company that uses phytosterols to make crops more resistant to drought, was chosen among hundreds of companies considered for C&EN magazine’s “10 Start-Ups to Watch for 2023.”

The magazine, published by the American Chemical Society and formally known as Chemical & Engineering News, has journalists based in Europe, the US and Asia and is widely read by chemical engineers around the world.

Jean-François Déchant, CEO and cofounder of Elicit Plant, told C&EN journalist Britt Erickson that the idea to use phytosterols in agriculture originated with a discovery by Elicit cofounder Olivier Goulay, who had been working in the cosmetics industry.

“By serendipity they found that they had a candidate product for cosmetics that was working pretty good on plant health,” Déchant said.

Phytosterols are lipids that form part of cell membranes in plants. They function as signaling molecules that trigger responses when plants are under stress. Elicit is the first to apply them to agriculture, according to Déchant, though the chemicals have been used in the cosmetics and nutrition industries.

Getting the plants to take up the fatty phytosterols was the big challenge, Déchant said. “When you try to bring a droplet of oil into a hydrophilic environment, it doesn’t work very well,” he said. “So we figured out a specific composition to make it happen.”

The company’s first product, Best-a Corn, needs to be applied only once and can be sprayed with the same equipment commonly used for pesticides. The product is currently available in some European countries, Brazil, and Ukraine. Elicit hopes to have the product available throughout Europe by the end of the year and is waiting for regulatory approval in the US. Formulations for more row crops are in the works.

Results from field trials in France, where Elicit is based, and around the world show that Elicit’s formulations improve yields for many crops. Elicit says Best-a can improve corn yields 10–12%.

Phytosterols act as messengers, signaling to the plant to do what it does naturally when faced with water shortages: enhance root growth and close stomata on leaves to limit evapotranspiration. The key is to apply the product before conditions become dry to give the plant time to grow deeper roots.

Déchant said that the products have no toxicity, which “helps us get through the regulators quite fast.”

Read the full article and more on the C&EN website (registration required).