Representative Subtheme Challenges:
We need to make use of all available carbon, including waste carbon resources, to meet current demands and overcome bottlenecks that prevent or slow a transition away from fossil inputs.
Although food and agriculture are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, both at the field level and in downstream production, food and agriculture can be used to create climate solutions.
Biotechnology can be utilized to reduce emissions and capture gases for potential utilization.
Representative Subtheme Challenges:
Powered by AI/ML and engineering biology, revolutionary advances are needed to produce high-yield crops adapted to changing climates and livestock with greater environmental sustainability.
Plant-based agriculture needs more resilient, systems-level approaches to meet growing demands for efficient land use and production of food and bioenergy feedstocks.
There is a pressing need to improve agricultural vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics to enhance food security, lower costs, and increase agricultural sustainability.
Innovations are needed to meet growing global demands for nutritious food, new bioproducts with novel properties, and replacements for products that depend on non-renewable resources.
Representative Subtheme Challenges:
There is an urgent need for research to enhance creation of domestic supplement chains for
natural sources of critical raw materials for biofuels or biologically-derived chemicals.
Research is needed to improve sustainable economic models that integrate investment
strategies and shared services, address supply-demand balance, and ensure economic viability.
Representative Subtheme Challenges:
New approaches are needed to design vaccines and biologics with features that offer broader protection, greater supply chain resilience, simpler routes of administration, and lower costs.
Advances in computing technologies and accessibility are needed to help integrate different types of health data for diagnosis and treatment planning, while preserving patient privacy.
New research and infrastructure, spanning from traditional farming and food production to sustainable biotechnologies, are needed to improve human nutrition and enhanced well-being.
A more expansive view of public health is needed to ensure that biotechnology innovations broadly benefit humans, animals and plants that serve as food, and the environment.
Both basic and applied research investments are needed to improve many aspects of cell therapy, including cell sourcing, manufacturing, reproducibility, and costs.
New technologies like at-home diagnostic tools and smart wearables for disease detection hold great promise, but additional research into these tools is needed to evaluate effectiveness.
Representative Subtheme Challenges:
Meeting the growing needs of the bioeconomy across all sections will require a diverse, skilled workforce spanning fundamental science to manufacturing.
Continued investments in foundational science and engineering research are needed to catalyze new breakthrough tools, technologies, and innovations to fuel the bioeconomy.
Traditional methods for engineering and manufacturing need to evolve to permit faster progression of foundational knowledge to bioproduct commercialization, e.g., lab to market.
New computational approaches are needed to integrate the vast multimodal biological datasets to enhance discovery, scalability, and sustainability of biotechnology science and engineering.
Unified and scalable data infrastructure is needed to leverage available data from multiple sources across different sectors to support application of new technologies for the bioeconomy.
Biotechnology-associated research and the resulting products need to be developed proactively to ensure best practices for security, safety, equity, accessibility, and sustainability.
To ensure societal acceptance and adoption of the products of biotechnology, there is an urgent need for effective communication of risks associated with biotechnological advancements.
To safeguard public health and the environment, research is needed to understand and preemptively address potential biosecurity risks in the bioeconomy.
Regulatory science research is needed to advance development of tools, standards, and approaches that support regulatory decision-making.