Don’t squander the scientific opportunity of a lifetime: UK must turbocharge its innovation to harness engineering biology, says Lords report

The Government and the City must take far greater risks to boost UK scientific innovation and commercialization or the UK will be trapped in a “doom loop” where foreign competitors leapfrog or exploit British breakthroughs, a Lords report warns.

The influential cross-party Lords Science and Technology Committee says the UK has already lost its position as a world-leader in engineering biology - and is in “severe” danger of slipping further behind without “urgent action” to turbocharge state and private investment and create a world-leading regulatory landscape.

There is a “small and closing window” of opportunity for the UK to reverse its decline and ensure the huge economic and industrial potential from home-grown scientific advances benefit Britain first. “We cannot afford to miss it,” the report says.

The unusually robust comments in a report - Don’t fail to scale: Seizing the opportunities of engineering biology - follow an eight-month inquiry into engineering biology, a fast-developing, highly competitive area of science which uses and adapts nature to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

Engineering biology has the potential to transform entire sectors, including food, the environment, healthcare, energy and manufacturing, making them more sustainable while creating thousands of well-paid jobs and propelling economic growth. The UK has many strengths in this area including world-leading universities, scientists and researchers, as well as top tech experts and a dynamic start-up scene. It has founded more bio-technology companies than any other nation in Europe.

Current examples of engineering biology in the UK include:

• converting waste into fuel using bio-engineered bacteria
• growing cells in a lab to produce meat. (The UK recently approved the use of so-called cultivated meat in pet food, the first European country to do so)
• using biology to recover and recycle rare earth minerals, and break down pollution in water
• creating bio-engineered plants resistant to diseases, reducing the need for pesticides and fungicides
• transforming industries like fashion by using biology to produce and fix dyes to textiles, reducing wasteful processes. (The committee heard that work was also being undertaken to turn fatty acids from fatbergs in sewers into products for the perfume industry, while leather-substitute handbags are made by a UK company with neither cows nor petroleum involved, but instead derived from coconut milk treated with engineered bacteria, making them more sustainable.)

Baroness Brown of Cambridge, chair of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, said: “Britain is a world-leader in scientific innovation, with a heritage that is the envy of the world. But all too frequently we are crashing into walls rather than smashing through ceilings. Pioneering companies urgently need to scale-up to become globally competitive - not get stuck in the investment ‘valley of death’. The Committee believes that without urgent action across the key areas set out in our report, the UK is at severe risk of losing the potential benefits of a world-leading engineering biology sector.

“All too often we hear that when companies reach a certain size, they move abroad for better investment and development prospects, taking most of the economic benefit with them. This failure to scale in the UK is a long-standing issue which requires an urgent, concerted, cross-government approach to fix.”

The Committee calls for action in seven key areas: strategy, skills, regulation, infrastructure, investment, adoption and governance. It says the Government needs to offer incentives to firms to invest in innovative bio-tech companies and products; ensure engineering biology is central to its Industrial Strategy; recommit to its £2 billion funding target over 10 years for R&D and ensure stable funding for laboratories; have effective policies in place to attract top talent, including from abroad; develop more routes into engineering biology such as through apprenticeships. A national sector champion for engineering biology should be appointed to help co-ordinate the sector, it says. It stresses that public investment is needed “at speed” while private cash must also flow in “or we will continue to see an exodus of capital and companies to the US”. However, in common with many technology sectors, scale-up investment is hard to come by in the private or public sectors in the UK, and the report stresses the need for urgent reform to address this.

Only after action is taken will UK scientists and technology companies be able to help tackle global challenges and contribute to the economic growth, prosperity and wellbeing of the UK, the Committee says.

Members acknowledge the risk of misuse by “hostile” countries and individuals, as well as public misunderstanding about science, and say this only underscores the need for the UK, having invested in home-grown expertise, to redouble efforts to ensure its technologies are understood and concerns addressed.

Read the report on the Committee's website