Engineering Life: Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology as the Next Industrial Frontier

A shift is underway in how materials, medicines, fuels, and food are produced. Industrial systems centered on extraction, transformation, and combustion have supported modern development, while also being associated with environmental impacts such as emissions and waste. An alternative approach, often described as engineered biology, emphasizes cultivation, fermentation, and synthesis and is viewed as a potential direction, though its impacts remain under evaluation.

Synthetic biology, which applies engineering principles to the design and construction of living systems, is increasingly being developed beyond academic laboratories. It is becoming an industrial platform (Cameron et al 2014; Mao et al 2021). The global synthetic biology market was valued at approximately USD 19.75 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach USD 56.48 billion by 2031, at a compound annual growth rate of 19.14% (Mordor Intelligence, 2026; Zhang et al 2025). This trajectory reflects the convergence of several enabling forces: dramatic reductions in the cost of DNA synthesis and sequencing, the proliferation of CRISPR-based genome editing, the rise of AI-guided protein and metabolic pathway design, and the maturation of automated biofoundry infrastructure that can compress the design-build-test-learn cycle from years to weeks.

The Architecture of Engineered Biology

At its core, synthetic biology treats the genetic code of an organism as programmable software and the organism itself as a production platform. Similar to how an electrical engineer selects components and designs circuits to achieve a specific function, a synthetic biologist combines genetic elements such as promoters, coding sequences, and regulatory components within a chosen host to produce a desired output, such as a molecule, material, or signal (Jinek et al 2012). The CRISPR-Cas9 system and its derivatives have made precision genome editing tractable at scale (Doudna&Charpentier 2014). Beyond gene editing, synthetic biology also draws on metabolic engineering, which involves redirecting an organism’s metabolic pathways to increase production of a target compound (Nadhif et al 2017). It also uses cell free systems that operate cellular machinery outside living cells, allowing greater control and fewer constraints from cellular processes (Whulanza et al 2014, Rahyussalim et al 2017).

AI-guided protein design tools, including AlphaFold and related approaches, have reduced tasks that previously required years of crystallographic research to hours of computation, contributing to a shift toward more data-driven methods in synthetic biology (Jumper et al 2021, Method 2021). The integration of machine learning into metabolic pathway optimization, gene circuit design, and strain engineering is contributing to a shift toward a more computational approach in synthetic biology. This development shows similarities to the materials informatics approach discussed in a previous IJTech editorial (January 2024).

Central to this transformation is the biofoundry, a highly automated facility in which the design, build, test, and learn cycle is carried out at high throughput. Equipped with robotic liquid-handling systems, automated DNA assembly platforms, and integrated computational pipelines, a biofoundry can execute hundreds of design iterations in parallel (Holowko et al 2021). Governments that view biomanufacturing as part of strategic infrastructure, including the United Kingdom, Singapore, Denmark, and the United States, have made significant investments in national biofoundry capacity (Hillson et al 2019). In the Asia-Pacific region, the Bioinnovation APAC 2026 forum convened in Singapore in March 2026, gathering over 250 participants to accelerate industrial biomanufacturing collaboration, signalling that Southeast Asia is positioning itself as an active participant rather than a passive recipient in this buildout (Biospectrum Asia 2026).

Industrial Applications and Regional Opportunity

The applications of synthetic biology to industrial production are diverse and, in many cases, near-term. Precision fermentation is enabling the production of proteins, specialty chemicals, flavors, and functional ingredients that were previously extracted at high ecological cost or synthesized using toxic reagents (Ro et al 2006, Paddon et al 2013). Engineered organisms are being developed to produce next-generation biofuels, such as hydrogen and fatty acid–derived compounds, as alternatives to earlier biofuels linked to competition with food production for land and water.

In Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Malaysia produce oil palm biomass at a large scale, which is widely regarded as a waste management challenge and may also serve as a potential carbon feedstock for domestic biomanufacturing. As noted in the our  editorial on March 2024, oil palm biomass has already demonstrated potential as a precursor for graphene-family advanced materials; synthetic biology offers a complementary route to valorize the same resource through microbial conversion into biodegradable polymers, platform chemicals, and bio-based coatings (Ijtech march 2024, Kusrini et al 2020).

In South America, Brazil offers perhaps the world's most mature proof of concept for biology-based industrial transformation. Its flex-fuel vehicle fleet, in which bioethanol derived from sugarcane fuels over 80% of light vehicles, reflects the long-term deployment of fermentation engineering at national scale (Bonini et al., 2025). The next frontier includes second-generation cellulosic ethanol, which uses sugarcane bagasse and other residues instead of sugar, along with expanding biorefineries toward higher-value biochemicals, bioplastics, and biosurfactants.

In Africa, Nigeria presents a comparable case due to its position as the world’s largest producer of cassava. The crop generates an estimated 40 million tonnes of processing waste annually across Sub-Saharan Africa, over half of which is currently landfilled or incinerated (Hierro-Iglesias et al., 2022). Engineered microorganisms that convert cassava starch and lignocellulosic residues into polyhydroxyalkanoates, which are biodegradable plastics with properties comparable to petroleum-derived polypropylene, may provide a way to utilize this waste stream as a higher-value product.

Challenges and the Engineering Research Agenda

The transition from laboratory demonstration to industrial deployment is not straightforward. A key challenge is the gap between laboratory and commercial scale, where factors such as metabolic burden, contamination control, process consistency, and genetic stability become limiting (Asin-Garcia & Martins dos Santos, 2025). These challenges can be framed as engineering problems, shaping a research agenda in which chemical engineers, process engineers, and bioprocess specialists have important roles to play (Tellechea-Luzardo 2022). The development of digital twins for bioprocess systems, which integrate computational biology models with real-time sensor data and process control, reflects a convergence of themes previously explored in our editorials on digital twins (Ijtech March 2024) and AI in engineering (Ijtech November 2025).

Regulatory frameworks for engineered organisms vary considerably across jurisdictions, and biosafety assessment processes differ in scope between countries (OECD 2025). The ethical dimensions of synthetic biology include ecological risks associated with the release of engineered organisms, the dual use potential of genome editing tools, and the distribution of benefits (Lee et al 2025).. These issues warrant careful consideration by the engineering community.