Reports

Summary: Between June and September 2025, DSIT undertook a research project that explored AI adoption by the UK Engineering Biology (EB) community. DSIT surveyed both vendors and users of AI, including researchers, academics, and commercial enterprises operating at the crossroads of biology, engineering, and computation. The survey received 368 total responses (1.42% return rate) limiting the generalisability of the results. Nonetheless, the diversity of responses provides confidence that the findings offer valuable insights into current practices and attitudes toward AI adoption in EB.

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Summary: SSAC, of which EBIC’s Professor Louise Horsfall is a member, produced this report to inform Scottish Government on the current EngBio landscape. It highlights the opportunities and potential challenges of utilising this important technology. The report draws on stakeholder engagement, surveys, roundtables, and desk research. Strategic action to realise the benefits for Scotland presented by EngBio is recommended.

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Summary: Innovate UK, in collaboration with UK Science and Technology Network (UK STN), delivered a Global Expert Mission (GEM) to Canada in 2025. This Expert Mission brought together a team of UK industry experts – including team members from EBIC – to assess the engineering biology industry in Canada to identify key areas for collaboration and potential programmes which could enable UK innovators to collaborate with Canadian partners.

The outcome report, as well as a webinar recording, are available here:

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Summary: Potter Clarkson, in collaboration with Inevus Advanced Analytics, have conducted a bespoke, in-depth analysis of European patent filings in synthetic biology, published between 2004 – 2023. Transformers supported topic modeling identified 40 topics via appropriate clustering of therapeutic and non-therapeutic-related uses of engineering biology / synthetic biology.

The definition of synthetic biology used was relatively broad, to encompass the whole repertoire of technology areas in which synthetic biology may be applied.

Read the report here

Summary: Engineering Biology is a platform technology that has the potential to impact so many aspects of our daily lives. The Aspirations report uses 5 case studies to explore the future of engineering biology, including my contribution highlighting the use of engineering biology for sustainable mining, metal recycling and to support a circular economy. This narrative pulls together many research strands and includes my thoughts on future directions, such as scale up, commercialisation and societal impacts. The report really delves into the challenges that Engineering Biology could address and I look forward to the conversations it opens up, especially with policy makers and the public – Prof. Louise Horsfall, EBIC Theme 4 Lead & Chair of Sustainable Biotechnology at the University of Edinburgh.