BioFoundry: NSF iBioFoundry for Basic and Applied Biology

Biotechnology has promised to solve many grand challenges of modern society. However, the traditional research and development process in biotechnology is very slow, expensive, and inconsistent. To overcome this key limitation, the goal of this project is to establish a national center for biofoundry applications (NCBA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The center would serve as a hub for innovation, bringing together researchers, industry experts, and policymakers to foster collaboration and accelerate the development of sustainable biomanufacturing processes. By centralizing resources and expertise, the center would streamline the creation of new bio-based products and technologies, ranging from renewable chemicals to advanced medical treatments.

This not only boosts economic growth and competitiveness but also enhances public health and environmental sustainability. Additionally, the center would play a vital role in education and workforce development, preparing the next generation of scientists and engineers to lead future breakthroughs in the bioeconomy.

The overall goal of the proposed project is to establish a national center for biofoundry applications (NCBA) to advance the bioeconomy. In the center, the biofoundry development will be enabled by a synergistic and fully integrated program consisting of an in-house research and technology development program, an external user program, and a knowledge sharing, education, diversity, and outreach program.

In the in-house program, existing workflows, tools, codes, parts, and organisms will be onboarded and new ones will developed. In the user program, a diverse community of external users will be engaged to develop new capabilities (workflows, tools, codes, parts, organisms) for the biofoundry and solve important scientific problems through an externally peer-reviewed, competitive proposal process.

Both the in-house and user programs are designed to synergistically develop a synthetic biology pipeline named AlphaSynBio that can be implemented on the biofoundry. The proposed national center is not simply an integrated collection of equipment for automated biological experiments and software. It will be an open ecosystem of disruptive thinking, education, and community engagement powered by state-of-the-art biofoundries.

The success of the proposed national center will revolutionize the way biology is taught, capture the imagination of a new generation of biologists, and train next generation workforce which is well versed in biology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

This project is jointly supported by the Divisions of Emerging Frontiers (EF), Biological Infrastructure (DBI), and Molecular and Cellular Biosciences (MCB) in the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO), and the Division of Chemistry (CHE) in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.