The aim of this competition is to deliver business led research and development that will:

• lead to new engineering biology products, processes or services
• de-risk the adoption of engineering biology technologies that offer high market potential

The funding support will help to accelerate the development and adoption of engineering biology technologies and techniques and by doing so provide solutions to societal challenges.

For the purpose of this competition, engineering biology refers to the:

• development or use of synthetic biology using engineering principles to design and fabricate biological components and systems
• adoption of synthetic biology in industrial processes and development of tools and technologies that support synthetic biology

Your proposal must clearly:

• demonstrate how your innovation relates to synthetic biology
• explain how your innovation fits with one or more of the specific themes for the competition

Your project can include:

• experimental evaluation
• prototyping
• product or service development planning
• demonstrations of utility and effectiveness
• demonstrations of safety or regulatory planning

We encourage you to collaborate with the UK research base and help to grow the UK’s Engineering Biology ecosystem.

Portfolio approach
We want to fund a variety of projects across themes and research categories. We call this a portfolio approach.

Specific themes

Your project must focus on one or more of the following:

• applying engineering biology solutions to one or more of the National Engineering Biology Programme (NEBP) themes
• development of cross cutting engineering biology technologies or services

The NEBP themes are:

• food systems
• clean growth
• environmental solutions
• biomedicine

Research categories

We will fund industrial research projects and experimental development projects, as defined in the guidance on categories of research.

Projects we will not fund

We are not funding projects that are:

• fundamental research or feasibility studies
• focussed on a product that is already on the market
• conducted to anything less than the highest standards of animal welfare
• clinical trials or preclinical evaluation of therapeutics
• not focussed on the competition themes

We cannot fund projects that are:

• dependent on export performance, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it exports a certain quantity of bread to another country
• dependent on domestic inputs usage, for example giving a subsidy to a baker on the condition that it uses 50% UK flour in their product

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