US President depriorises biotechnology

The order was published and executed to advance engineering biotechnology and biomanufacturing towards innovative solutions in health, climate change, energy, food security, agriculture, supply chain resilience, and national and economic security.

President Trump’s U-turn on biotechnology could soon turn out to be an own goal. The Republican senators from five federal states – Nebraska, Indiana, Maine, Michigan and Wyoming – who have built up a strong bioeconomy infrastructure based on the order in order to lead the world in the medium-term transition from fossil-based industrial production to energy-saving, low-carbon biomanufacturing, will not be very amused about Trumps revocation, which is clearly driven by professional incompetence. Brussels insiders had previously assumed that Trump would not harm those who voted him into office. This has now been disproved with the withdrawal of the executive order.

European stakeholders such as the Bio-based industry Consortium called on US biotechs to come to Europe as the bloc is an excellent place for bioeconomy R&D, particulary in food-tech, bioleaching to revover critical raw materials, biochemical engineering and protein engineering.

Sofie Carsten Nielsen, the Director of the European Biosolutions Coalition said that the unique opportunity for Europe would need huge public co-investments because high CAPEX costs often kill biotech alternatives to fossil-based production: “We have what it takes to make Europe a place where biosolutions are not only born, but also grow up. However, this requires massive investment in testing and scaling up biosolutions, removing regulatory barriers that prevent them from reaching the market quickly, and a bold and broad European Biotech Act. A lot is at stake. If Europe does not take decisive action, we risk losing substantial growth, jobs and the opportunity for significant CO2-reductions,” she said.

Back in 2022, the UK was the only European state that – like the US – complemented its bio-based economy approach with engineering biology and artificial intelligence to reprogramme microorganisms to production strains for chemical building blocks, recombinant plastic substitutes such as silk fibres, sustainable aviation fuels and climate-neutral biofuels.

Dr Guillermo Nevot, Chair of the European Synthetic Biology Society, confirmed: “With AI we are moving from describing biological systems to actively designing new ones, from protein design to precision fermentation. Europe needs to keep up, scale up processes, take risks and support creative synthetic biology projects across all Europe if we want to have a seat in the global arena.”

While France has built more than 20 biorefineries driven by the ambition to become a world leader in the bio-based economy, Italy will channel huge sums into the sector. At the end of February, the Italian parliament approved €2.2bn until 2027 for the conversion and construction of biorefineries that process classic bio-based residual streams.

Germany is presumeably set to follow suit as its technology think tank SPRIND just recently published a position paper providing a way to co-invest in the most promising scaling approaches of what it calls deeptech bioeconomy, a combination of biobased economy supplemented with AI-driven automated process control and advanced engineering of production strains or cell-free systems to give maximum yield at low cost of goods.

It is now up to Germany’s next chancellor Friedrich Merz to channel money from the new German €100bn climate transformation fund into lighthouse projects such as Evonik’s Rheticus scale-up to attract investors to Germany and Europe. Rheticus mimics photosynthesis by water electrophoresis using renewable energy and microbial conversion of synthesis gas to butanol and hexanol building blocks for the SAF, transport and chemical sector. Similar approaches developed by German BRAIN Biotech AG deliver different chemical building blocks, according to Execultive Vice President Dr Martin Langer.

According to a brand-new study from the Advanced Biotech for Sustainability (AB4S), advanced biotechnology can contribute to €1tr additional revenues by 2040, if it is properly supported. The report says also, food biotech and biofuels could contribute to a 5% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions but relies on outdated (2022) governmental estimates of CO2 emissions instead of AI-driven interpretation of satellite measuresments of greenhouse gases through Al Gore’s Climate Trace project.