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Exosect is a company which spun out of the university based on the
University's research and is now successfully employing 20
people in a base quite me here in Winchester
and they have now over 60 patents and 7 products which are sold around the world,
being used in places as wide-ranging as the Royal Opera House
and Covent Garden, right through to farmers growing rice
in India. Seven billion people currently live on the planet
and the issue with global food security is at the top of all the
national agendas, David Cameron is leading a task force
to try and look at it. Pesticides are being banned or the public are worried about
pesticide,
so there's a real need to develop new technology
which can help protect the world's food supplies and that's what we did at
Southampton.
That's what form Exosect and that's now what effectively helping
secure the food supplies have over seven billion people on Planet Earth.
The use of insecticides has been very important in terms of protecting the
world's food supplies.
However, people are getting concerned about the environmental impact and just
recently neonicotinoid
insecticides have been temporarily banned in Europe because of the concern
the impact they have on bees. Our research
has been looking at biological control efforts, i.e. not insecticideal but
actual based on pheremones and traditionally it's been very expensive
to pay to have those regulated
because they're very targeted and effect one pest
in one crop whereas they're trying to compete
with chemicals which protect all pests in all crops
and therefore can cost a lot of money to register. Our research was used as a case
study
to actually reduce the regulations needed
on our type a technology and since
that case study has changed UK and European legislation
it's been estimated that over two billion dollars has been spent by
companies
interested now in investing in biological control
methods because of that easing of the regulation.