Science and Technology Committee report on seizing the opportunity of engineering biology

Approximate read time: 15 minutes

The House of Lords is scheduled to debate the following committee report on 28 April 2025:

House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, ‘Don’t fail to scale: Seizing the opportunity of engineering biology’, 14 January 2025, HL Paper 55 of session 2024–25

1.    Background to the committee’s inquiry

In April 2024 the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee launched an inquiry into engineering biology. Framing the scope of its inquiry, the committee recognised the technology was defined in slightly different ways. It noted the government defined engineering biology as the “design, scaling and commercialisation of biology-derived products and services that can transform sectors or produce existing products more sustainably”.^[1] The committee added that engineered biological systems could be used to “manipulate information, assemble materials, process chemicals, produce energy, provide food, and help maintain or enhance human health and the environment”. It further said the Council for Science and Technology, which advises the prime minister on science and technology policy issues, defined engineering biology as:

[…] the application of rigorous engineering principles to biology, enabling the construction of new or redesigned biological systems, such as cells or proteins, with applications across numerous sectors, including food, materials, and health.^[2]

The committee observed the previous government’s ‘Science and technology framework’, published in March 2023 and later updated in February 2024, had identified engineering biology as one of five technologies that were “most critical to the UK”.^[3] This was followed by a ‘National vision for engineering biology’ published by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology in December 2023, which was based on the findings from an earlier call for evidence.^[4] The then government said this document set out its vision for the UK to have a “broad, rich engineering biology ecosystem that can safely develop and commercialise the many opportunities to come from the technology and the underlying science”.^[5]

The committee said it would explore the following issues as part of its inquiry:

• which technologies fall under the umbrella of engineering biology, and what its potential is, particularly in delivering UK economic growth through commercialisation and for improvements to public services
• what the key applications for engineering biology might be, how realistic some of the claims made are, which developments are already underway, and which areas of engineering biology the UK excels at and which it is well placed to exploit
• what more needs to happen to ensure that the science developed in the UK benefits public services and the UK economy
• the ethical, regulatory and safety implications of the rapid developments in engineering biology

The committee launched a formal call for evidence with specific questions to address these issues as part of the inquiry’s launch.^[6]

The committee subsequently held 11 oral evidence sessions on seven dates between April and October 2024.^[7] The committee also made available 53 written evidence submissions made in response to its call for evidence.^[8]

2.    What did the committee’s report say?

The committee published its report on 14 January 2025.^[9] The report contained 35 conclusions and 40 recommendations.

The committee said of its overall conclusions:

Engineering biology is a fast-developing field of science with exciting potential applications across many sectors, from medicines and manufacturing to making new materials or more resilient crops.

We have a fantastic science base and real potential to harness this technology to benefit the UK, but we are at real risk of falling behind other countries which are starting to invest more.

The UK has identified this as a priority technology and there are many promising developments here, but our inquiry found that there is much more to be done.

Urgent action is needed or the UK is at risk once again of seeing science and technology developed here, but exploited for economic benefit overseas.^[10]

The committee called for action in seven key areas: strategy, skills, regulation, infrastructure, investment, adoption and governance. The report summarised its key recommendations in connection with each of these as follows:

• Strategy: The government needs a plan for engineering biology as part of its industrial strategy. It should, as a minimum, recommit to the previous government’s £2bn funding target over 10 years to maintain the UK’s R&D sector. The plan will require concrete outcomes and targets, regular progress updates against these metrics, and coordinated work across government. It should identify how novel cross-sectoral technologies like engineering biology can be supported to deliver the wider goals of the industrial strategy such as sustainability and economic growth. It must consider factors such as the availability of feedstocks and where the UK can be a leading player, in the context of global markets and supply chains.
• Skills: The UK needs an expanded training offer and more effective visa policies to attract top talent from abroad. UK Research and Innovation should fund more doctoral training programmes for engineering biology, incorporating a year in industry, including start-ups and spinouts, and there is a gap for masters’ level graduate conversion courses. Skills England should work with industry to expand routes into engineering biology, with a focus on apprenticeships and training for technical roles. High upfront visa costs and limited selection criteria limit the global talent visa, which should be expanded in scientific and technical areas.
• Regulation: The UK needs a swift and clear regulatory landscape to help drive responsible innovation. At present it is too difficult for companies to understand which regulators will oversee them and what the route to market is in this cross-disciplinary sector. The creation of the Regulatory Innovation Office is a good step. It is vital that regulators operate at the leading edge of the technology, sufficiently resourced, and independent. They should have experts from a wide range of disciplines and industries on hand, to clarify the landscape and ensure that any risks are identified and managed. Standards are important for any industry to grow and are particularly lacking in engineering biology: the UK can use its research expertise to play a leading role in setting these internationally.
• Infrastructure: Infrastructure is key at various stages of development, from early-stage research infrastructure which allows companies to acquire the data needed for patents, to scale-up infrastructure to demonstrate that a new process can work on an industrial scale. The UK has some useful infrastructure, especially at the early stages, but its use is limited by lack of awareness, and prohibitive access costs. A map of available research infrastructure and funding support for researchers and businesses to use it is needed. Core, stable funding for laboratories would prevent them from charging high prices for access or relying on inconsistent grant funding. A flexible policy for scale-up infrastructure is required to respond to a rapidly developing sector and provide support to build facilities when the need is identified.
• Investment: Both public and private investment are needed. The UK’s public investment offer suffers from a pipeline problem—Innovate UK and research councils can provide early-stage funding, but it is unclear where to go for scale-up funding. Initiatives like the National Wealth Fund and British Business Bank may help address this, but their roles need clarity, their mandates need to be expanded. They need to be able to move at speed and take risks, necessitating teams of specialist investors for large-scale technological investments. In the private sector, there is a significant lack of scale-up funding coupled with a long-term decline in the UK’s capital markets, preventing the growth of companies. Widespread and significant financial reforms, including those announced in [Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves’] 2024 Mansion House speech, which aim to address the limited availability of scale-up funding in the UK must be rapidly progressed, or we will continue to see an exodus of capital, companies and pioneering technology to the United States.
• Adoption: public procurement and incentives. The government can lead the way in adopting engineering biology through the power of public procurement, as we have seen in the US with its BioPreferred model, but this requires adopting a healthy appetite for risk and making a clear statement that procurement budgets are to be used in part to support UK-based innovative companies and products. Many larger companies have biotechnology initiatives, but without incentives they will not shift production away from cheaper, but unsustainable fossil-fuel based processes. Faster adoption of biobased processes is needed to deliver cost reduction through learning and scale. Sector-specific government incentives or mandates are required to support the adoption of bio-based processes and help with market creation.
• Governance: The potential societal and economic benefits of engineering biology could be severely undermined by safety and acceptability concerns. There is need for renewed public engagement to ensure the benefits of these technologies are understood and concerns addressed. The UK must build on the ‘Biological security strategy’ [June 2023], and work with international partners, to ensure that malicious uses of engineering biology are prevented, and to ensure that the nation is protected against biological threats, whether engineered or natural.^[11]

The committee further recommended the government appoint a “national sector champion for engineering biology” to coordinate activity across government. It added:

We believe, as [Minister for Science, Research and Innovation] Lord Vallance of Balham told our committee, that there is a real opportunity for engineering biology to provide immense benefits to the UK. It can help us to address the challenges we face in health, sustainability, and in addressing climate change. There are major opportunities to grow the economy by applying this technology. We have many of the ingredients to make this a success. But this reaction requires a catalyst.

Without urgent action in the areas this report outlines, we are in danger of losing out as other countries catch up and overtake the UK’s level of investment and R&D. Lord Vallance indicated that we have a small—and closing—window of opportunity to realise these benefits in the UK. We cannot afford to miss it.^[12]

In addition, Baroness Brown of Cambridge (Crossbench), chair of the committee at the time of the report’s publication, said of the report’s findings:

Britain is a world-leader in scientific innovation, with a heritage that is the envy of the world. 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.

All too often we hear that when companies reach a certain size, they move abroad for better investment and development prospects, taking most of the economic benefit with them. This failure to scale in the UK is a long-standing issue which requires an urgent, concerted, cross-government approach to fix.^[13]

3.    What was the government’s response to the report?

The committee published the government’s response on 17 March 2025.^[14]

In an accompanying letter to Lord Mair (Crossbench) the committee’s chair since 30 January 2025, Lord Vallance wrote the government agreed that “engineering biology (EB) offers the significant potential for economic growth and catalysing impact across multiple industries”.^[15] Lord Vallance added the government also recognised the “need for urgency to strengthen the UK’s position and how central the ability for companies to scale-up in the UK is for this”. He continued:

Our industrial strategy will set out a decade-long plan for our economy, squarely focused on the eight sectors with the greatest growth potential and anchored in a positive and pragmatic vision of what Britain’s future could look like. The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology will be taking forward a dedicated plan for our digital and technologies sector.

Actions taken through the industrial strategy will reinforce and complement actions that we have already taken to support the sector. In February 2024 UK Research and Innovation announced £100mn of funding for EB missions hubs and awards. To address regulatory issues, we announced the creation of the Regulatory Innovation Agency, with EB one of its four early priority areas. The Food Standards Agency has begun delivering a £1.6mn sandbox on cell-cultivated products. Building on this, the government has also announced that the second round of the EB sandbox fund will open in April 2025, to help innovators understand and tackle regulatory barriers in transformative innovations. Furthermore, we are developing the next generation of academics and founders through new PhD studentships, and through a new Centre for Doctoral Training for EB and additional doctoral focal awards.

Lord Vallance added he agreed with the committee that addressing safety and acceptability concerns was “critical”. He said the government had launched gene synthesis screening guidance in October 2024 to “ensure that the UK secures the economic, health and wider societal benefits from advances in biosciences and biotechnologies whilst mitigating the risks”.

Lord Vallance also wrote the government was seeking to “engage with the sector effectively and receive the right expert advice”. He said an EB Advisory Panel (EBAP) had “brought together both the current and next generation of academic, start-up and industry leaders in EB across the UK”, and that a separate EB Responsible Innovation Advisory Panel (RIAP, formally the Biosecurity Leadership Council) had “now met five times to discuss issues of responsible innovation and to support our policy development”. He continued:

But we recognise there is more to do. Infrastructure is a vital part of being able to address scale-up issues, and we are now working closely with the EB Advisory Panel to understand how different models for infrastructure have strengths and weaknesses in the UK’s unique context. We are also addressing funding gaps, through the Mansion House compact, reforms to the British Business Bank and creating the National Wealth Fund with £5.8bn of additional funding, raising its total capitalisation to £27.8bn.

The UK remains one of the global leaders in EB, particularly in research and development, higher education and responsible innovation. We have high ambitions to continue building-up the sector to deliver bio-based solutions for economic and wider societal benefit and look forward to working with the committee to further the potential and impact of the UK’s EB sector.^[16]

The government had earlier said it would publish its industrial strategy in spring 2025.^[17]

4.    Read more

• House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, ‘Don’t fail to scale: Seizing the opportunity of engineering biology’, 14 January 2025, HL Paper 55 of session 2024–25; ‘UK must turbocharge its innovation policy to harness engineering biology, say peers’, 14 January 2025; and ‘Engineering biology could bring us to the cusp of a new industrial revolution: How can we seize the opportunity?’, 14 January 2025
• House of Commons Library, ‘Industrial strategy in the UK’, 24 January 2025
• House of Lords Library, ‘Science and technology’s contribution to the UK economy’, 24 October 2024
• House of Lords Library, ‘Science and Technology Committee report: ‘‘Science and technology superpower’: More than a slogan?’’, 1 June 2023

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