To lead a collaborative project your organisation must be a UK registered business of any size. The consortium must contain at least one UK registered micro, small or medium sized enterprise (SME) claiming grant funding on this application.

To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:

• business of any size
• academic institution
• charity
• not for profit
• public sector organisation
• research and technology organisation (RTO)

No single organisation can claim more than 70% of the total project costs.

An eligible organisation can only lead on one application. An eligible organisation that is leading an application can be included as a collaborator in a further two applications and if not leading, can collaborate in any number of applications.

Your project must:

• have total costs of between £750,000 and £2.5 million (up to 70% of costs can be covered, depending on business size)
• last between 12 and 36 months
• not start before 1 April 2027
• end by 31 March 2030

No single organisation can claim more than 70% of the total project costs.

Any organisation receiving funding must carry out its project work in the UK, intend to exploit the results in the UK, and spend most of the funding within the UK.

The aim of this competition is to deliver business led research and development that will:

• lead to new engineering biology products, processes or services
• de-risk the adoption of engineering biology technologies that offer high market potential

The funding support will help to accelerate the development and adoption of engineering biology technologies and techniques, driving economic growth from UK strengths in research and innovation and by doing so provide solutions to societal challenges.

To be considered within scope for this competition, the primary innovation and competitive advantage underpinning the project must arise from or enable engineering biology.

For the purposes of this competitions engineering biology is defined as the purposeful engineering of biological systems. These will create new or enhanced functions that do not occur naturally, or that cannot be achieved efficiently through conventional approaches. This includes the design, modification or creation of organisms, cells, genetic circuits, enzymes, proteins or other biomolecular systems that exhibit novel or enhanced functionality.

Your solution can focus on one or more of the following technologies in which the core innovation is in engineered biological systems, for example, built on synthetic biology techniques:

• Biosensors and Diagnostics
• Biomanufacturing Systems
• Biocatalysis and Chemical Production
• Engineered Biomaterials
• Metabolic Engineering
• Nucleotide synthesis
• Engineered Proteins and Enzymes
• Cell and Microbe Engineering
• Synthetic Biology Platforms
• Gene Editing and Genome Engineering
• AI and Computational Biology

Your project must:

• demonstrate how you will address a real commercialisation constraint in the UK and focus on applying engineering biology solutions to one or more cross cutting engineering biology technologies, products or services
• apply engineering biology solutions to one or more of the UKRI’s Engineering Biology Priority Programme themes
• be collaborative industrial research
• focus on solutions that are either new or not yet widely used
• demonstrate how your innovation relates to engineering biology
• explain how your innovation fits with one or more of the specific themes for the competition
• address supply chain validation through involvement of at least one named end user in the project, for example, an OEM, Tier 1, or other organisation further downstream in the supply chain

Elements of the project work that support the translation, validation, scale-up, manufacturing, regulatory progression, product development or commercial deployment will be supported through this competition. This is providing that they are directly enabled by, and derive value from, the underlying engineering biology innovation.

Your project must address supply chain validation through involvement of at least one named end user in the project, for example, an OEM, Tier 1, or other organisation further downstream in the supply chain.

The involvement of the end user can be in the form of, but is not limited to:

• being on a project advisory board
• being a non-funded or funded project collaborator

The named end user is the organisation, further along the supply chain, that will use or directly benefit from the innovation.

The end user must have a clear, defined role within the project governance or work plan.

Government organisations, regulators or academic institutions can only be end users where you provide a clear justification, for example, where they act as a system integrator or service provider for the innovation.

In this competition we will not accept consultancies as end users.

Your project must focus on developing or applying engineering biology solutions to one or more of the following themes:

• Health
• Agriculture and Food
• Chemicals and materials
• Low Carbon fuels
• Waste and environment
• Cross cutting technology, service development

We are not funding projects that:

• are not engineering biology focused
• are not focussed on the competition themes
• include the clinical development of any biologic, vaccine or engineering biology derived small molecule
• are for clinical trials or preclinical evaluation of therapeutics
• are fundamental research, feasibility studies or discovery based

Innovate UK Business Connect will hold an online briefing event on Monday 14 September at 11am: click here to register for a place. A recording and slides will be available afterwards.

If you would like help to find a collaboration partner, contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s Biotechnology team.