Industrialization of Biology: A Roadmap to Accelerate the Advanced Manufacturing of Chemicals (2015)

Tom Connelly
Executive Vice President & Chief Innovation Officer, DuPont

Doug Cameron
Co-President and Director, First Green Partners

Lionel Clarke
Co-Chair, UK Synthetic Biology Leadership Council

• What are the main drivers for adoption of bio-based processes in industry now and in the future?
• What are the main lessons from recent experience in developing industrial (bio) processes?
• How may feedstock options evolve and impact the supply chain?
• How might the adoption of bio-based processes change the nature of the chemical and energy industries?
• What are the particular considerations for commodity versus specialty chemicals?
• What are the greatest barriers to process development and what is most needed to overcome them?

Markus Pompejus
Head of Research, Bioactive Materials and Biotechnology, BASF
Mark Burk
Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Genomatica
Guo-ping Zhao
Director, Laboratory of Synthetic Biology, Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology (IPPE), Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS)
Jennifer Holmgren
Chief Executive Officer, LanzaTech

Panel discussion: ~45 min

Pilar Ossorio
Professor of Law and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin Law School, Madison

• How should we characterize, measure, and minimize the different types of risks that could arise from different types of industrial biology (production of commodity chemicals vs. “fine chemicals”)?

• What types of risks might be shared across a variety of different types of chemical production?
• Are traditional risk assessment approaches adequate for understanding and responding to risks posed by biological production of commodity chemicals and “fine chemicals”?
• Into what existing risk regulation and governance frameworks will different types of industrial biology fall?
• What factors will influence the ways various publics understand the risks and uncertainties associated with biological chemical production?
• How do we communicate the risks and uncertainties of continuing on the course of traditional chemical production (i.e., there may be risks to doing something new, but there are also environmental and health risks to doing the same old thing)?
• Given that risks cannot be reduced to zero, and attempting to do so could be counterproductive and unjustifiably expensive, how do we develop systems that can quickly identify and appropriately mitigate adverse events when they do occur?

Mark Segal
Senior Microbiologist, Risk Assessment Division (RAD), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Eleonore Pauwels
Program Associate, Science and Technology Innovation Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Dietram Scheufele
John E. Ross Professor in Science Communication, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Ed You
Special Agent, WMD Directorate, Federal Bureau of Investigation

Andy Ellington
Wilson M. and Kathryn Fraser Research Professor in Biochemistry, University of Texas at Austin
Chris Voigt
Associate Professor of Biological Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• How do we coordinate system design (parts, genes, regulation) with whole genome engineering methods, including random and directed DNA changes?
• How can we measure the impact of synthetic genetics on the host, insulate these effects, and use genome-wide information to inform the design process?
• Can we utilize part interactions with the host as part of the design, or is there a push toward ever more orthogonal systems?
• To what extent are programmed genomic interventions of any sort likely to undergo further modification as a result of selection? Can we make interventions that are robust to changes in environment and evolution?

Todd Peterson
Chief Technology Officer, Synthetic Genomics Inc.
Jennifer Doudna
Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of California, Berkeley
Harris Wang
Assistant Professor in Systems Biology, Columbia University
Timothy Lu
Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Steve Laderman
Director, Molecular Tools Laboratory, Agilent Technologies, Inc.

• What role does in vitro and in vivo measurement play today in pursuing the science, technology, and practice of synthetic biology?
• What are the primary methods used today?
• What do you see as the most promising emerging in vitro and in vivo measurement methods?
• What gaps in sample handling, measurement methods, data analysis and interpretation, and/or standards will still remain compared to what is desirable?
• What breakthroughs would be needed to close those gaps?
• What research would be needed to achieve those breakthroughs?
• What would be the benefits? What would that future state look like?

Drew Endy
Associate Professor, Stanford University
John McLean
Stevenson Associate Professor of Chemistry, Vanderbilt University
Johnathan Sweedler
James R. Eiszner Family Chair in Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Marc Salit
Leader, Genome Scale Measurements Group, NIST Material Measurement Laboratory

Tom Connelly
Executive Vice President & Chief Innovation Officer, DuPont

Tom Connelly
Executive Vice President & Chief Innovation Officer, DuPont

Nathan Hillson
Biochemist Staff Scientist, Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

• What are the bottlenecks to integrating the diaspora of bioinformatics tools and biological knowledge into a coherent industrially relevant workflow (e.g., not invented here syndrome, software licensing, software documentation, unaligned incentive structures, data structure standardization)?
• What are the current hurdles to the development of predictive genome-scale metabolic models that are accurate under industrially relevant conditions (e.g., sufficiently detailed comprehensive experimental measurements, non-steady-state mathematical frameworks, lack of fundamental biological knowledge)?
• Are there specific technical/knowledge/infrastructure challenges that, if overcome, would dramatically improve the chemical space accessible to retrosynthetic design and the accuracy thereof?
• In a world where any biological analytical measurement can be readily output in DNA (sequencing readout only required, no mass-spec, etc.), and there is a deluge of test data, what would be the resulting bottlenecks and infrastructure challenges?

Eric Klavins
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington

Bernhard Palsson
Galletti Professor of Bioengineering, Professor of Pediatrics, and Principal Investigator of the Systems Biology Research Group, University of California, San Diego
Chris Anderson
Assistant Professor of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley
Sriram Kosuri
Assistant Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

Kristala Jones Prather
Theodore Miller Career Development Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• How can we expand the range of molecules and/or materials that can be industrially produced through biology?
• How do we/can we significantly increase the range of elements incorporated into biologically produced chemicals beyond carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen?
• What new methods are required for pathway discovery and design, enzyme discovery and design, and implementation to bring these new molecules/materials to market?

Michelle Chang
Associate Professor of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley
Jeffrey Moore
Senior Investigator, Process Research, Merck and Company, Inc.
Mike Jewett
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University

Huimin Zhao
Professor and Centennial Endowed Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Process scale-up and scale-out are critical aspects of commercializing industrial processes for production of chemicals and fuels. In this panel, we will highlight several case studies such as the large-scale production of 1,3-propanediol, and 3-hydroxypropionic acid and discuss the key challenging issues in process scale-up and scale-out.
• What are the key lessons we learned from the few successful case studies?
• What are the key challenging issues in process scale-up and scale-out?
• How can we ensure the engineered organisms will behave similarly under large-scale process conditions as in small-scale laboratory conditions?
• How does technoeconomic analysis help process scale-up and scale-out?

Bill Provine
Director of Science & Technology External Affairs, DuPont
Bruce Dale
University Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University
Joel Cherry
President, Research & Development, Amyris