Food Sustainability

Oxitec’s Friendly™ insects are being developed to be targeted, safe, and sustainable systems for protecting crops against the growing threat of the world’s most damaging pests.

Our Purpose

Oxitec’s Friendly™ solution offers an environmentally sustainable solution to control agricultural pests that are devastating crops and livestock globally. Our technology platform is founded on world-class science, and we remain the leader in developing insect solutions that are self-limiting, safe, effective, and capable of meeting the needs of a changing planet.

Our team members are working 24/7 to build biological solutions that will protect crops and livestock for decades to come. Agricultural pests currently cause billions of dollars of losses around the world, having a significant impact on food quality, security and economic wellbeing.

Precision crop protection

Oxitec’s Friendly™ technology has been developed to provide precision-based pest suppression system that is safe, environmentally-friendly and self-limiting, allowing farmers to effectively control pest insects without trading effectiveness for sustainability.

Integrated pest management

Friendly™ technology provides farmers with the ability to combat damaging insect pests in a way that is compatible with other tools, supporting sustainability and, potentially, helping to reduce or reverse insect resistance to other crop protection tools.

Environmentally friendly

Our technology is friendly to the environment, targeting only the target insect pest and allowing other insects, like bees and butterflies, to survive unharmed.

Our Solution

Our Friendly™ agriculture protection technology is simple — our male insects carry a single self-limiting gene, which after mating with targeted wild-type female pests, passes on preventing the female offspring from surviving. These female offspring do not mature to reproduce, so the pest population is reduced.

Recent studies also show that sustained releases of these Friendly™ male insects can reduce or delay resistance to other approaches, including pesticides and biotech crops, which means that Oxitec’s Friendly™ technology has the unique potential of unlocking additional value in other methods of pest control.