Engineering Biology Collaborative R&D: Round 3

This business-led collaborative research and development competition will fund new engineering-biology products, processes and services and de-risk technologies with strong market potential. Projects may address health, agriculture and food, chemicals and materials, low-carbon fuels, waste and environment, or cross-cutting technology and service development. The central innovation must purposefully engineer biological systems and may involve biosensors, biomanufacturing, synthetic-biology platforms, gene editing, AI or computational biology. Projects must have total eligible costs of £750,000 to £2.5 million, last 12 to 36 months and begin no earlier than 1 April 2027. The open competition closes on 3 November 2026 at 11:00am UK time.

A UK-registered business of any size must lead a collaboration that includes at least one UK-registered SME claiming grant funding. Academic institutions cannot lead. The project must include at least one named downstream end user and funded work must be carried out mainly in the UK with UK exploitation of results.