Technology Innovation Institute Launches Cutting-Edge Biofoundry to Advance R&D in Synthetic Biology

State-of-the-art facility will function as a central hub for innovation across diverse biotechnology disciplines

Abu Dhabi-UAE: 9th May 2024 – The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a leading global scientific research center and the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), today announced the launch of a pioneering Biofoundry. The groundbreaking facility is responsible for driving collaborative research and development in synthetic biology, focusing on core areas such as genetic engineering, metabolic engineering, and bioinformatics.

Synthetic biology is an emerging field in biotechnology with life-changing potential to address critical global challenges in ecological welfare, biodiversity protection, and the sustainable management of natural resources. The inauguration of TII’s Biofoundry marks a pivotal stride in pushing the boundaries of these crucial areas and underscores TII’s commitment to catalyzing breakthrough solutions with an impact across healthcare and agritech industries.  

Central to the success of TII’s Biofoundry is its collaborative ecosystem, where multidisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, and researchers from research centers across TII can integrate their efforts and synergize their expertise. This convergence of talent fosters the design, construction, and validation of intricate biological systems tailored for diverse applications, spanning across pharmaceuticals, healthcare, agriculture, biomaterials, and environment.

The TII Biofoundry comprises of sophisticated laboratory infrastructure and technologies, empowering researchers with high-throughput robotic systems, next-generation sequencing and DNA-synthesis platforms, latest computational tools to conduct complex research experiments, as well as data analysis and modeling. Such resources accelerate the design-build-test-learn cycle that forms the core of synthetic biology, enabling the development and optimization of enhanced biological systems answering the needs of industry.

Speaking on the opening of the new facility, Dr. Thomas Launey, Chief Researcher of TII’s biotechnology research center, said, “Our TII Biofoundry is an essential tool for our synthetic biology roadmap, bringing high throughput scale and massively increasing the solution space that can be examined and data that can be fed to Machine Learning/AI for further enhancement. The Biofoundry allows us to partner with academic institutions, industry, and startups to accelerate innovation and product development, using collective wisdom and technology resources efficiently.”

Following its launch, the TII Biofoundry is now a member of the Global Biofoundry Alliance (GBA), an inclusive network of biofoundries committed to facilitating partnerships, confronting common challenges, and fulfilling unmet scientific and engineering requirements. This affiliation emphasizes the role of the TII Biofoundry as a regional leader and key contributor to the global synthetic biology landscape.