Overview

The UK government has identified engineering biology as a strategic priority within its Modern Industrial Strategy, recognising its potential to transform sectors from agriculture and food through to chemicals, materials, medicine and the environment. In recent years, there has been substantial investment through the National Engineering Biology Programme and UKRI’s mission‑led initiatives.

To stimulate the development and adoption of engineering biology technologies Innovate UK, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) are preparing for an Engineering Biology Contracts for Innovation (CFI) initiative. CFIs are competitive UK government programmes where public bodies fund innovative companies to develop solutions for specific challenges, providing a route to market, funding for R&D and a chance to work directly with the public sector.

Contracts for Innovation Challenge areas

Low-cost, real-time water quality monitoring for policy, public health, and ecosystem management using genomic monitoring and surveillance

• Portable, autonomous systems that enable continuous, real-time monitoring of pollutants and pathogens in rivers, lakes, and bathing waters to enable rapid responses to pollution events, biodiversity threats and biosecurity risks.
• Combine advanced sensing technologies – biosensors, eDNA, CRISPR-based diagnostics – with AI-driven analytics and digital platforms to deliver actionable insights for regulators, water companies, and communities.

Predicting ecosystem health and resilience from eDNA via AI-driven functional genomics

• Predictive early warning systems capable of forecasting risks from ecosystem degradation and collapse, using data on emerging threats such as antimicrobial resistance, climate stress and ecosystem tipping points, across terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments.
• Use AI to integrate multi-omics data sets and their rich metadata, and linking live data streams such as eDNA, environmental sensors and satellite data to produce forecasting systems.
• Particular focus on sampling, database and primer design, and bioinformatics and analysis.

Accelerating next generation veterinary vaccines through engineering biology

• Vaccine platforms to enable faster response to new or emerging diseases by accelerating the development pipeline, improving manufacturing flexibility, therefore enhancing veterinary vaccine availability and reducing outbreak and wider economic costs.
• Plug-and-play veterinary vaccine platforms such as modular backbones, nucleic acid, viral vector, protein or plant-based, that can be rapidly adapted by swapping genetic or protein inserts.
• Engineer novel vaccines which overcome limitations of traditional vaccines, i.e. greater stability, require only one shot, provide wider coverage or which block shedding.

Rapid diagnostics to maintain food standards and regulatory compliance

• Innovative methods to improve food safety (pathogen, allergen and chemical contaminant) and authenticity testing and enhance surveillance across the food supply chain.
• Utilising new biological or chemical detection technologies, novel platforms and advanced informatics, deployed to allow targeted or non-targeted detection, to accelerate and improve decision making for inspections, routine monitoring, incident response, and food fraud.

Why attend?

This event, delivered by Innovate UK Business Connect, is the final stage of a two-stage engagement process for this CFI and follows two previous online workshops. It will help stakeholders understand the direction of the proposed competition, explore the problem statements identified by Defra and FSA, and potential solution areas in more depth, alongside opportunities for partnership building.

Attendees will have the opportunity to engage with Innovate UK, Defra and FSA colleagues to learn more about the competition and the specific challenge areas.

Who should attend?

Innovators from industry that have the potential to develop engineering biology inspired solutions to the problem statements identified – we anticipate that these solutions will be at TRL4+ (technology readiness level).

This event will be managed through an expression of interest (EoI) process. This is an industry focused event and business attendance will be prioritised. Academic attendees will be approved on a case-by-case basis.

Please note that the Expression of Interest will close at 17:00 on 8 July 2026.

Agenda

10:30 Registration & networking

11:00 Welcome and aims of the day

11:10 UKRI Engineering Biology priorities and funding opportunities

11:20 Overview – Contracts for Innovation

11:30 Cast study

11:45 Defra problem statements

12:00 FSA problem statement

12:10 Q&A

12:30 Lunch & networking

13:15 One-to-one Meet the Buyer

• Table 1 – Defra challenge 1
• Table 2 – Defra challenge 2
• Table 3 – Defra challenge 3
• Table 4 – FSA challenge 1

14:55 Next steps

15:00 Close