October 9, 2014
By Krystle Vermes, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Marrone Bio Innovations, Inc. announced on Oct. 8 that it will be reducing its head count by approximately 23 percent. The provider of bio-based pest management solutions is attempting to streamline its operations and reduce its expenses.
“We continue to push forward with a long-term, global vision for the business that remains fundamentally unchanged,” said Pam Marrone, chief executive officer of Marrone Bio Innovations. “At the same time, we believe that reducing expenses in connection with a refocusing of our business development efforts was the prudent thing to do. We expect to forge a stronger and more focused organization, and we remain dedicated to our long-term goal of driving value to our shareholders, our partners, our customers and our community.”
The company has already announced its goal to only move forward with projects that are projected to have the greatest near-term growth potential. Its COO and numerous staff members have also recently left the team.
Collaborating For the Future
In July, Marrone announced a collaboration with Evogene Ltd. , a leading plant genomics company that focuses on enhancing crop productivity for food.
The partnership was designed to leverage the expertise of each company in its distinguished field. Evogene is going to work to create seeds that are resistant to pests.
“This very unique collaboration being announced today brings together industry leading and synergistic discovery capabilities to address a major unmet need in agriculture biotechnology,” said Ofer Haviv, president and chief executive of Evogen. “We expect our joint efforts will result in significant product opportunities for both Evogene and MBI, and we are very pleased to join forces with a company that is an industry leader in its areas of interest. This collaboration demonstrates how Evogene’s established capabilities can be leveraged into new fields and new product types, such as ag-biologicals, while in parallel, broadening the product portfolio in our existing fields by adding two new product programs to our recently launched activity in insect resistance seed traits.”
The Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation has also evaluated the collaboration and decided to provide partial funding for the companies’ initiatives. This comes at a time when crop depletion due to pests is projected to continue to grow.
mar “This exciting collaboration with Evogene will enable us to leverage our discovery and development strategy to explore an even wider range of microbes with novel insecticidal genes,” said Marrone.
