Climate Change Solutions
Addressing climate change through renewable energy, sustainable manufacturing, climate-smart agriculture, and carbon sequestration technologies.
Food and Agriculture Innovation
Sustainably feeding nearly 10 billion people by 2050 through biotechnology, precision agriculture, and alternative food sources.
Supply Chain Resilience
Building robust, adaptable networks that can withstand disruptions from pandemics, climate events, and geopolitical conflicts.
Human Health
Advancing personalized medicine, disease prevention, and healthcare sustainability through biotechnology innovation.
Cross-Cutting Advances
Investing in foundational infrastructure, tools, policies, and workforce development spanning all bioeconomy sectors.
All Subtheme Challenges
Climate Change Solutions
CCS-01: Creating Value from Waste Carbon for a Circular Bioeconomy
"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."
CCS-02: Climate-Smart Food and Agriculture
"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."
CCS-03: Reducing CO2 and Other Harmful Gases
Biotechnology can be utilized to reduce emissions and capture gases for potential utilization.
Food and Agriculture Innovation
FAI-01: Accelerated Breeding of Plants and Animals
"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."
FAI-02: Climate Resilience and 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."
FAI-03: Protecting Plants and Animals to Sustain the Planet
"There is a pressing need to improve agricultural vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics to enhance food security, lower costs, and increase agricultural sustainability."
FAI-04: Biomanufacturing Alternative Proteins and Other Agriculturally-derived Bioproducts
"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."
Supply Chain Resilience
SCR-01: Resilient Domestic Supply Chains for Biofuels, Bioproducts, and Biochemicals
"There is an urgent need for research to enhance creation of domestic supply chains for natural sources of critical raw materials for biofuels or biologically-derived chemicals."
SCR-02: Economics and Value Chain in the Bioeconomy
"Research is needed to improve sustainable economic models that integrate investment strategies and shared services, address supply-demand balance, and ensure economic viability."
Human Health
HH-01: Vaccines and Biologics
"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."
HH-02: Advanced Computing for Human Health
"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."
HH-03: Human Nutrition
"New research and infrastructure, spanning from traditional farming and food production to sustainable biotechnologies, are needed to improve human nutrition and enhanced well-being."
HH-04: Public Health Outcomes in the Bioeconomy
"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."
HH-05: Cell Therapies
"Both basic and applied research investments are needed to improve many aspects of cell therapy, including cell sourcing, manufacturing, reproducibility, and costs."
HH-06: Intelligent Medical Assistance/Smart Health Care
"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."
Cross-Cutting Advances
CCA-01: Workforce Development for the Bioeconomy
"Meeting the growing needs of the bioeconomy across all sectors will require a diverse, skilled workforce spanning fundamental science to manufacturing."
CCA-02: Foundational Discovery Driving the Bioeconomy
"Continued investments in foundational science and engineering research are needed to catalyze new breakthrough tools, technologies, and innovations to fuel the bioeconomy."
CCA-03: Biomanufacturing, Bioreactors, and Scale-up
"Traditional methods for engineering and manufacturing need to evolve to permit faster progression of foundational knowledge to bioproduct commercialization, e.g., lab to market."
CCA-04: Future of Advanced Bioeconomy Computing
"New computational approaches are needed to integrate the vast multimodal biological datasets to enhance discovery, scalability, and sustainability of biotechnology science and engineering."
CCA-05: Data Sharing and Infrastructure
"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."
CCA-06: Responsible Innovation
"Biotechnology-associated research and the resulting products need to be developed proactively to ensure best practices for security, safety, equity, accessibility, and sustainability."
CCA-07: Risk Communication
"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."
CCA-08: Biosecurity in the Bioeconomy
"To safeguard public health and the environment, research is needed to understand and preemptively address potential biosecurity risks in the bioeconomy."
CCA-09: Advancing Regulatory Science for Products of Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing
"Regulatory science research is needed to advance development of tools, standards, and approaches that support regulatory decision-making."