The UK needs to take ‘urgent’ action to embrace engineering biology or risk losing out on the economic and industrial benefits, a report from the House of Lords science and technology committee has warned.
Engineering biology involves the design and construction of new or modified organisms or molecules, based on those found in nature. Current applications include converting waste into fuel using engineered bacteria, producing synthetic meat and recovering and recycling rare earth minerals using microorganisms.
The report makes policy recommendations to the UK government and other organisations based on findings from an inquiry and call for evidence that began in April 2024. The purpose of the inquiry was to enable the House of Lords science and technology committee to understand the current and future applications for engineering biology and its potential, in terms of delivering economic growth through commercialisation and improvements to public services, as well as the ethical, regulatory and safety implications of the field.
The committee highlights that while the UK was a world-leader in the field of engineering biology 10 years ago, this position has now slipped as other countries have more consistently invested time and money in the field.
In 2023, the previous government identified engineering biology as one of five ‘critical’ technologies that the UK should focus on and launched a National Vision for Engineering Biology, which the current government has expressed support for. However, the committee states that, without action now, the UK is at ‘severe risk’ of seeing the economic and industrial benefits of science and technology developed in the UK, exploited overseas.
To address this, the committee highlights seven policy areas – strategy, skills, regulation, infrastructure, investment, adoption and governance – for the UK to focus on in order to harness engineering biology and enable it to flourish.
The report also said that the government needed to make a plan for engineering biology as part of its industrial strategy and that the training on offer in the UK needed to be expanded to attract top talent from abroad. Alongside this it said there was a need for consistent funding, investment in research infrastructure and public engagement to ensure the technology is understood and concerns are properly addressed. It also recommended that a national sector champion for engineering biology should be appointed to coordinate these activities.
‘Britain is a world leader in scientific innovation, with a heritage that is the envy of the world,’ said Julia King , chair of the Lords science and technology committee. ‘But all too frequently we are crashing into walls rather than smashing through ceilings. Pioneering companies urgently need to scale-up to become globally competitive – not get stuck in the investment ‘valley of death’. The committee believes that without urgent action across the key areas set out in our report, the UK is at severe risk of losing the potential benefits of a world-leading engineering biology sector.’
Brown said that in many cases, when a company reaches a certain size, the owners move it away from the UK for better investment and development prospects, taking most of the economic benefits with them. ‘This failure to scale in the UK is a long-standing issue which requires an urgent, concerted, cross-government approach to fix,’ she concluded.
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