Bristol Hosts Swiss-British Summit to Foster Innovation in Healthcare and Environmental Sustainability

The UK and Switzerland are both science superpowers.  Collectively, they host ten of Europe’s top 20 research universities. Switzerland has ranked first in global innovation for the past decade and is home to several world-class research laboratories and multinational companies like Novartis. While the UK boasts a world-leading engineering biology community and forward-thinking policy, exemplified by the UK Government’s National Engineering Biology Vision published in December 2023.

A Memorandum of Understanding signed in November 2022 between the UK and Switzerland builds on a longstanding history of collaboration between the two countries, with detailed aspirations to encourage future cooperation in ‘deep science’ and ‘deep tech’ areas such as engineering biology.

The Summit, organised in partnership with the Swiss Business Hub UK & Ireland, the Bioindustry Association and Lucideon, aimed to bring together academic thought leaders and representatives from the life science and pharmaceutical industries. These included key Government officials, including members of the UK Government’s newly appointed Engineering Biology Steering Committee regulators, specialist start-up incubators such as Science Creates (Bristol) and BaseLaunch (Basel), and focused investment firms to identify bilateral opportunities for commercialisation through innovation, and policy and diplomacy in science and innovation.

His Excellency Markus Leitner, Ambassador of Switzerland to the United Kingdom said: “The United Kingdom and Switzerland are uniquely placed to work together on this frontier of scientific discovery and technological innovation.

“Bringing together scientists, industry leaders and start-up entrepreneurs from both countries will foster the exchange of ideas, forge new partnerships, and catalyse new initiatives that will shape the future of synthetic and engineering biology.”

The Summit took a deep dive into future perspectives in cell engineering, bioprocessing and scale up, AI-driven solutions in synthetic and engineering biology, and accelerating the translation of fundamental research to commercial uptake.

Anike Te, Aegis Professor of Engineering Biology at the University of Bristol and Chief Strategy Officer at Lucideon, added: “Innovation is essential for solving the global challenges we face today. Engineering biology has the potential to provide many of these solutions. The UK and Switzerland are important countries for innovation and it is inspiring to see more collaboration in synthetic and engineering biology.”

Inspiring keynote talks were presented by Tay Salimullah VP, Head US & Global Commercial, Value & Access, and Member of the Executive Committee at Novartis Gene Therapies and Harry Destecroix, founder of Science Creates and co-founder of Ziylo, the hugely successful University of Bristol spin-out company.

Spotlight pitches from UK and Swiss engineering biology start-ups highlighted some of the most recent innovations entering the market.