Enhancing Undergraduate Education to Drive Responsible Growth of the Bioeconomy

Enhancing Undergraduate Education to Drive Responsible Growth of the Bioeconomy

Marc Facciotti

The US bioeconomy generated an estimated $300 billion of revenue in 2011. Advances in foundational technologies, such as synthetic biology, are lowering barriers to biotechnology, enabling a growing number of people to participate. Technological advances and the democratization of biotechnology present opportunities for economic growth, particularly in areas like small-scale, distributed biomanufacturing. In addition to growth, technical advances springing from the bioeconomy also present great hope for reducing the severity of some of our nation’s most pressing financial challenges, particularly those related to the increasing costs of healthcare delivery and energy.

Worldwide Network of Community Labs

Worldwide Network of Community Labs

Ellen Jorgensen

Community biolabs are a natural environment for thoughtful examination and discussion of the implications and ethics surrounding cutting-edge DNA-based technologies. Creating a network of such spaces could have a profound effect at the grassroots level on both science education and the public perception of synthetic biology. Organizations such as Genspace have demonstrated that reframing the synthetic biology laboratory facility as a neighborhood resource can demystify and democratize biotechnology, allowing it to have a more open relationship with the eventual end user. 

Love Our Monsters – Radical Collaboration in a Post-Disciplinary Age

Love Our Monsters – Radical Collaboration in a Post-Disciplinary Age

Christina Agapakis

Over the past decade, synthetic biology has disciplined itself. Synthetic biology aims to make biotechnology a “true engineering discipline,” through the application and adoption of engineering design principles. As biology and engineering have merged in synthetic biology, the blurring of the boundary between science and technology has created a new discipline, complete with its own boundaries and its own discursive methods for creating, reinforcing, and enforcing those boundaries. 

International Synthetic Biology Society

International Synthetic Biology Society

Andrew Chang, Anne Cheever, Michael Fisher, Jeff Ubersax, Louise Horsfall

Synthetic biology offers significant promise for advances in health and medicine, food and energy production, and environmental sustainability. Realizing this potential requires continued commitment to driving bio-innovation, ensuring biosafety and biosecurity, and building a robust bioeconomy. This strategic action plan proposes the formation of an International Synthetic Biology Society to support the responsible development and deployment of synthetic biology in the public interest. 

Opening New Channels for Industry-Academic Relations

Opening New Channels for Industry-Academic Relations

Derek Lindstrom and Nathan Hillson

An effective approach to building relationships between culturally distinct organizations is through immersive experience. This strategic plan proposes to create an opportunity to place academic scientists into an industry-based postdoctoral position without jeopardizing their ability to compete effectively for tenure-track academic positions. In essence, we are offering a return ticket to academics interested in gaining industrial experience. The mechanism that we present is a modification of the NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award (the K99). 

A Call for a Public, Democratically Deliberative Facet in Synthetic Biology Policymaking

A Call for a Public, Democratically Deliberative Facet in Synthetic Biology Policymaking

Ryan Ritterson

While the synthetic biology community enjoys support from a majority of people aware of its activities, it remains unknown to most of the nation. Further, policy makers do not rely on a coherent vision of synthetic biology in order to make regulatory decisions. This leaves a partial vacuum in the public decision-making capacity for these new technologies that could stunt their development. 

Circumventing the Paradox of Regulating Emerging Technologies

Circumventing the Paradox of Regulating Emerging Technologies

Walter Valdivia

New technologies create, at once, the need for regulation and resistance to it within regulatory agencies. Each bureaucracy is bound by law to protect public health and the environment but also seeks to avoid the risks of expanding the scope of its authority and having to mediate the concomitant political controversies. Hence, the paradox of regulating emerging technologies.

Coherent Block Funding for Microbial Environmental Risk Assessment and Mitigation Strategy Development

Coherent Block Funding for Microbial Environmental Risk Assessment and Mitigation Strategy Development

Nathan Hillson

Coherent Block Funding is a mechanism for government, industry, and institutional agencies to support and coordinate the assessment of environmental risks posed by genetically engineered microbes, and the development of strategies to mitigate these risks. In short, a single block of funding would support several testing facilities in addition to multiple individual investigators developing mitigation strategies. 

Synthetic Biology Biosecurity Tabletop and Corresponding Educational Tools

Synthetic Biology Biosecurity Tabletop and Corresponding Educational Tools

Ryan Morhard

This Strategic Action Plan proposes convening essential stakeholders within the synthetic biology and biosecurity community to participate in a biosecurity tabletop exercise meant to form the basis for a high-production web-based learning tool designed to enhance learning by enabling students, scientists, policymakers, and emergency professionals to virtually simulate participation in such an exercise. 

A Vision for a Synthetic Biology Standards Consortium

A Vision for a Synthetic Biology Standards Consortium

Michal Glaldzicki, Sarah Munro, Patrick Boyle, Jeff Ubersax

The promise of synthetic biology to be instrumental in improving global quality of life and economic security can not be realized if there is not a concerted effort to transform synthetic biology innovations into useful, safe, and affordable products. As synthetic biology continues to develop, growing numbers of government and non-government organizations have focused on how synthetic biology could be used to responsibly improve global quality of life while considering environmental and health safety issues. This action plan proposes the development of measurement, performance, and safety standards for synthetic biology by a multi-stakeholder consortium as an effective way of ensuring the responsible development and wide acceptance of this technology.

Incentive-Driven Information Sharing for Engineering Biology

Incentive-Driven Information Sharing for Engineering Biology

Karmella Haynes

The public supports synthetic biology endeavors through tax dollars and private funding. The social mission of this action plan is to optimize the return on this public investment by facilitating the transformation of synthetic biology research into widely accessible information to support the development of new technologies. It describes the development of an incentive-driven platform to stimulate and sustain crowd-sourced data sharing. This information will support future synthetic biology endeavors and the livelihoods of students and trainees in the field. 

Metafluidics

Metafluidics

David Kong

Synthetic biologists need great tools to realize their creative visions. Microfluidic, or “lab-on-a-chip” instrumentation has the potential to be such a foundational tool for synthetic biology. Despite numerous examples of microfluidic devices performing complex processes central to synthetic biology, ranging from automating and miniaturizing DNA synthesis to performing single cell analyses, they are not commonly used. Microfluidics are not easy to make or use, and researchers are typically unable to leverage the designs and hardware of other groups. To help address these issues I propose in this action plan to develop metafluidics, a toolkit for microfluidics. 

SBICE: Synthetic Biology Integrated Concurrent Engineering Framework

SBICE: Synthetic Biology Integrated Concurrent Engineering Framework

John Cumbers

Despite ongoing scientific and technological advancements in the field of synthetic biology, there is a major bottleneck in the development of applications: design. The process of identifying the necessary components that need to be stitched together remains a laborious and time consuming task. This strategic action plan discusses the implementation of an accelerated design methodology for synthetic biology. This methodology, known as Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE) in the aerospace industry has cut preliminary design time at NASA from nine months to three weeks. 

Synthetic Biology for Global Health: A Problem-Driven Approach to Healthcare Innovation

Synthetic Biology for Global Health: A Problem-Driven Approach to Healthcare Innovation

Keith Tyo

Synthetic Biology is a powerful technology, capable of creating low cost, effective healthcare solutions (e.g. drugs and molecular diagnostics) that could be used in extremely impoverished regions of the world. While the potential impact of Synthetic Biology, in general, is compelling, two challenges have limited this impact to date: (1) the identification of specific opportunities remains challenging, as the vast majority of Synthetic Biology practitioners live far away from the resource-poor and are not intimately aware of the problems, and (2) adequate early and mid-stage funding to pursue problem-specific technologies.