Global Centers: Reliable and Scalable Biofoundries for Biomanufacturing and Global Bioeconomy

This award is funded by NSF Global Centers program, an innovative partnership with funding agencies in Canada, Finland, Japan, Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom, to jointly support use-inspired research addressing global challenges through the bioeconomy. These partnerships leverage resources to tackle challenges at a larger scale than would be possible for one funding agency alone.

This Center is jointly supported by NSF, , the Research Council of Finland and Business Finland, Japan Science and Technology Agency, the National Research Foundation of Korea, and UK Research and Innovation.

Biofoundries stand to be as transformative to biotechnology as computers are to information technology. However, their wide adoption for biomanufacturing and global bioeconomy faces a challenge. It is hindered by the lack of standards and metrics in data, workflows, ontologies, and regulatory considerations.

This project addresses this challenge, opening the way to the full-scale adoption of biofoundry applications throughout society. The Center leverages the international expertise of seven successful biofoundries from the US, Finland, Japan, Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom. It engages investigators from academia and the industrial sector across borders.

Beside improving the reliability and scalability of biofoundries, the investigators enable scientific breakthroughs. They develop genetic design rules, microbial cell factories, and artificial intelligence (AI) tools for biotechnology. The Center also promotes the training of a workforce for the bioeconomy with a global view and unique skills at the interface of AI, synthetic biology, and robotics.

One of the biggest scientific and technical challenges in synthetic biology for the bioeconomy is to establish robust, predictive, and reproducible genetic design rules for different applications. Biofoundries are well-suited to address such challenge. They facilitate large-scale, fully annotated and robust biological design and measurement at different scales.

However, due to vastly different configurations, instruments and software used by the growing global network of biofoundries, as well as a lack of standards and metrics, comparable data acquisition at scale is not possible. This Center leverages international expertise to address this limitation and unlock the bioeconomy. It develops standards and metrics, both technical and non-technical.

Standardization and metrics ensure interoperability and reproducibility, improve efficiency in innovation pipelines, support policies and legislation, and accelerate commercialization. The team consists of 40 investigators from five countries and 17 institutions. These include universities, national labs, private companies, and non-for-profit organizations.

The Center brings together experts in synthetic biology, biofoundry, automation and robotics, AI/ML, software engineering, governance, education/training, diversity, public policy, and outreach. It focuses on four thrusts: (1) develop and validate cross-national standards and metrics for biofoundry applications; (2) perform cross-national comparison of governance and regulatory frameworks for biofoundries to establish best practices; (3) develop cross-national programs for industry partnerships and public outreach; (4) develop cross-national programs for education and workforce development.

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.