moa Technology

moa Technology is a company dedicated to finding a new generation of safe and effective herbicides to help farmers across the world produce high quality food for all. moa Technology has assembled a team of passionate and talented scientists, technicians and operational staff, led by our CEO, Virginia Corless.

There is an urgent need for new herbicides as resistance to current products increases. Without new herbicides, agricultural productivity will suffer, and more land and other resources become needed for agriculture. New herbicides also bring other benefits, including improved safety and other environmental benefits, such as a reduced ploughing of soil as a method to combat weeds.

The company’s plant-led platforms directly search for compounds with new modes of action (MOAs), widely recognised as necessary to tackle herbicide resistant weeds. These platforms provide a fundamentally new way to discover herbicides, screening six times faster than the industry standard.

moa Technology has a unique, systematic, empirical search system for finding herbicides with new modes of action (MOAs), using intellectual property initially developed by its founders in the University of Oxford’s Department of Plant Sciences. It asks the most important questions first, identifying whether a compound has a novel MOA at the outset. Furthermore, it uses miniaturised plants to identify chemistries that work under real-world farm conditions.

The company is located in the UK, with its headquarters in the Oxford Science Park. It also has operations at the Stockbridge Technology Centre, an independent agricultural and horticultural centre of excellence in Yorkshire.