ITI Life Sciences, Scotland’s publicly funded innovation group, has pinpointed synthetic biology as the next area where it will finance R&D projects to drive commercialisation. It wants to commission R&D to develop novel technologies that can be further developed to create commercial products. The R&D programmes will receive in the range of £2 million to £5 million over an anticipated term of 18 to36 months, and are expected to lead to the creation of centres of research excellence in Scotland.
Synthetic biology merges biology with engineering to create new microorganisms programmed to perform biological processes for specific industrial applications. It promises significant advances on current genetic engineering technologies owing to the level of both engineering involved and the controllability of the process.
Through its market and technology analysis process ITI has concluded that such applications will address market needs in a variety of sectors, including bioenergy, chemical synthesis, drug and vaccine development, biosensor development and tissue engineering. As a result, synthetic biology is attracting considerable interest from academia, industry and the financial community, and major opportunities exist in the development of enabling technologies to drive the area forward.
ITI has identified the key enabling technologies necessary for this field to reach a critical mass and wants to fund R&D to develop tools, strategies and methods that enable gene and genome synthesis and assembly, and that can be further developed to create commercial products.
Responses are invited from companies, agencies, institutes, academia and individuals. No geographical restrictions apply and ITI Life Sciences welcomes responses to this call from non-UK organisations.
Eleanor Mitchell, Managing Director of ITI Life Sciences, said, “Synthetic biology is a new and very exciting area of R&D that represents a significant step forward in using living organisms to carry out complex biological processes. However, it is still at an early stage and the main enabling technologies need to be developed in order to access the huge commercial potential we see for successful applications across multiple markets.
ITI’s market analysis indicates that synthetic biology has potential applications spanning at least four major industries:
• chemicals (e.g. biological factories producing high value chemicals or bioplastics)
• pharmaceuticals (e.g. building or reprogramming organisms to produce new drugs)
• energy (e.g. biomass conversion and biofuel production)
• biotechnology (e.g. biosensors and tissue engineering)
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