Topic: Engineering biology

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

Innovate UK supports pilot-scale development and validation of laboratory-proven engineering biology innovations. Projects must include access to UK scale-up facilities and address health, food and agriculture, chemicals and materials, low-carbon fuels, waste and environment, or enabling technologies. UK SMEs must lead; eligible partners include universities and research organisations. Total project costs must be GBP 200,000–750,000, with projects lasting up to 24 months. These are project-cost limits, not grant-award amounts. The competition opened on 7 September and closes on 21 October 2026