The Warwick Integrative Synthetic Biology Centre has recently received additional funding of £900K to continue its programme of research up to the end of March 2022, bringing to 7 years its continuous funding from UKRI since its launch in 2015. Together with the matched funding provided by the university, total funding obtained by WISB now exceeds £19M in total, making it by some margin the largest single research grant ever received by the University of Warwick. The School of Engineering has received almost £2M of this funding, which has led to some notable successes, including:

• a Nature Communications publication (and best poster award at the Metabolic Engineering 14 Conference) for Dr. Ahmad Mannan,
• a Nature Communications publication and a £0.5M Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship on “Overcoming cellular constraints for real-world engineering of biological systems” for Dr. Alex Darlington,
• a paper on the cognitive constraints that shape public debate on the risks of Synthetic Biology, published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology (IF 19.5), and
• former WISB PDRA Dr. Mathias Foo returning to the School as a Senior Teaching Fellow.

WISB has recently submitted a £1.8M proposal for a further 2 years funding under the Engineering Biology Transition Awards call, to align its research activities with the recently announced National Engineering Biology Programme (NEBP). The Transition Award bid “Microbial Biosynthetic Pathways: Innovative Construction and Control Engineering” was formulated by 3 of the original WISB team (McCarthy, Challis, Bates) together with several new early-career investigators (Darlington, Alberti, Jenner). Beyond the time-period of the proposed Transition Awards, the WISB community anticipates another round of large-scale UKRI Research Centre funding via the NEBP programme, subject to the forthcoming government spending review.