Track 4 Session Details
AFCC Conference Breakout Sessions
Breakout Sessions are 90 minutes, each one has one moderator with a maximum of four to five speakers.
Breakout sessions will be focused on the following five subject areas:
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Track 2: Sustainable Feedstocks and Biofuels, Driving Decarbonization
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Track 4: Synthetic Biology, Alternative Proteins, Regenerative Agriculture, Food & Fiber
Track 4 Breakout Session Details​
Synthetic Biology, Alternative Proteins, Regenerative Agriculture, Food & Fiber
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This Track is Sponsored by:
Monday, November 2, 2026​
All sessions will be held in National Harbor 7
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Session 1: 8:00 AM TO 9:30 AM: Biotech-Driven Soil Innovation: Engineering the Soil Microbiome as Critical Infrastructure for Agriculture
Moderator: Joel Stone, President ConVergInce Advisers and President of Climate Systems Solutions
Speakers:
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Boyce Thompson Institute
Synthetic Biology can be harnessed to produce valuable consumer, industrial, everyday materials, and chemicals. Soil degradation is fundamentally a biological system failure, not just a chemical or agronomic one. The depletion of microbial diversity, collapse of symbiotic networks, and disruption of nutrient cycling have transformed soils from self-regulating ecosystems into input-dependent substrates.
Biotechnology enables a transition from:
• Chemical substitution → Biological orchestration
• Input maximization → System optimization
• Yield focus → Resilience + carbon + productivity stack
The Core proposition:The soil microbiome represents the largest under-leveraged biological platform on Earth, with the potential to become a multi-trillion-dollar innovation and carbon infrastructure layer.
We will hear from companies that are developing technology, processes, and tools related to step change developments in agriculture using biological solutions. The panel will be focused on making progress with innovative or revolutionary technologies to advance agriculture. We will discuss how some of these companies are progressing. Join this diverse panel of thought leaders in using Synthetic Biology in Agriculture and delivering ideas and innovations to supply solutions.
Session 2: 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM: Synthetic Biology Tools – Latest Trends, Advancements and Applications
Moderator: Patrick Boyle, Founding Partner, American Wetware
Speakers:
Synthetic biology tools are being deployed in biomedicine (e.g., CAR T-cell therapies, engineered bacteria for drug delivery), industrial biotechnology (biofuels, biopolymers, renewable chemicals), and sustainable production (replacing fossil-based materials). Advancements in synthetic biology tools now combine precision genome editing, automated DNA synthesis, AI-assisted design, and modular metabolic engineering, enabling faster, more predictable, and scalable creation of biological systems for diverse applications. This panel will provide recent processes, obstacles, solutions, and products using these tools.
Session 3: 1:30 PM TO 3:00 PM: From Discovery to Deployment: Aligning Academia, Industry, and Government to Advance the Bioeconomy
Moderator: Garrett Dunlap, Director of Policy and Partnerships, Engineering Biology Research Consortium
Speakers:
The United States leads in biological research and discovery, but too many promising technologies struggle to advance from the laboratory toward commercial production. Closing this gap requires stronger connections among academic researchers, companies, government agencies, and regional partners—and an R&D ecosystem better equipped to carry innovations through validation, scale-up, and demonstration.
This panel will examine how these sectors need to work together to translate advances in biology into new products and processes across food, agriculture, chemicals, materials, and manufacturing. Panelists will discuss how public research investments can better address translational and industrial needs; how companies can engage earlier with researchers; and how shared infrastructure, technical expertise, and regional capabilities can help technologies progress beyond proof of concept.
Drawing on practical experience and emerging models the discussion will consider how research priorities, funding mechanisms, facilities, and partnerships can be better aligned across the development pathway. Panelists will identify where promising technologies most often stall, what each sector can contribute at those points, and which collaborative approaches can strengthen domestic biomanufacturing and capture more of the economic value created by American R&D.
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When the Biology Works but the Economics Don’t - Baylie Schott, Senior Research Associate, Lux Research
Industrial biomanufacturing has gone through several waves of hype, but today’s developers, investors, and corporate partners are approaching the field with more grounded expectations. Even so, many projects still struggle to close the gap between technical validation and bankable, scalable production, not because the biology fails, but because operating assumptions, scale-up timelines, site requirements, and partner roles are often underestimated or misaligned. Drawing on multi-stakeholder interviews with biomanufacturing developers, engineering partners, commercial operators, and ecosystem stakeholders, this presentation will examine where industrial biomanufacturing projects most often break down as they move from promising process performance to real-world production. It will highlight what successful projects anticipate earlier, including realistic ramp-up periods, downstream processing constraints, feedstock and utility requirements, infrastructure needs, and commercial partner readiness, and what stakeholders must consider sooner to turn industrial biomanufacturing from a promising technology platform into a reliable engine for chemicals, materials, and broader industrial innovation.
Session 4: 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM: Infrastructure, Feedstock, Power & Energy – Building the Future of Biomanufacturing
Moderator: Sarah Glaven, Executive Director – Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, Princeton University
Speakers:
Center Director, Renewable Resources and Enabling Sciences
National Laboratory of the Rockies
As biomanufacturing grows as an industry it should be a vision of the future, not the past. The full potential of biomanufacturing to offer cost-competitive products, reduce waste, create jobs, and grow the economy will only be realized if innovation is integrated across three foundational domains: feedstock, infrastructure, and power and energy. Distributed, modular biomanufacturing is proposed as a solution to integration by making it easier to co-locate flexible manufacturing unit processes with a range of feedstocks and access to renewable power. In the United States, recent policy recommendations from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy have called government and the private sector to support distributed, modular biomanufacturing. In addition, the Department of War has sponsored research and development projects for distributed biomanufacturing through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the tri-service research offices, and currently has a call for demonstration and prototype projects to support biomanufacturing in contested environments. In this session, we will explore what it would take for distributed, modular biomanufacturing to be not only a vision, but the reality, for the future of biomanufacturing across a range of sectors including industrial, food, health and medicine.
Tuesday, November 3, 2026
All sessions will be held in National Harbor 7
Session 5: 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM: Cell-free Systems for Chemical Synthesis
Moderator: David Dodds, CTO, SynAppBio, Inc.
Speakers:
The global chemical industry is estimated to be over $6 trillion, and contributes about 7% of the global GDP. It operates today running largely thermal processes as well as those requiring pressure, with precious metal catalysts. Since the use of “unorganized ferments” in 1897 by Buchner to produce ethanol from starch (what we would call yeast lysates today) the promise of using biological processes outside of living cells has been recognized and pursued. If you are synthesizing a molecule from other molecules, you are performing chemistry, and today, the most powerful tools for performing chemistry are those provided by biology.
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The advantages of using single enzymes and more complex biological pathways outside of intact cells have been recognized for half a century or more, but the methods to fully exploit them are only recently available. While fermentation has been well-studied and widely used, the use of cell-free systems ranging from single enzymes catalyzing a single reaction, to reconstructed metabolic pathways, and new reaction routes not found in Nature, show how the chemical industry can advance. Cell-free systems can offer greater production efficiency for many processes through exquisitely selective reactions, and the ability to operate at near-ambient temperatures and pressures. By freeing enzyme-driven chemical reactions from the limitations imposed by cellular environments, scaling bottlenecks that has hampered commercial success in the synthetic biology are removed.
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This session will provide present examples of this type of technical change in the chemical industry.
Session 6: 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM: AI-driven Catalyst Design - Challenges and Opportunities
Moderator: Joseph McAuliffe, Principal Consultant, McAuliffe Consulting Services
Speakers:
Artificial intelligence (AI) and specifically Large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved structural prediction for enzymes and other complex molecules in recent years – however designing for catalytic activity is a far more formidable challenge where angstrom-level prediction is often required. What are the limitations of LLMs in this space? Are hybrid AI models that combine LLM and physics-based calculations the key for rapid catalyst design? What sort of experimental data is needed to train such models and validate outcomes? Can this loop be fully automated?
This breakout session will examine the impact and potential of AI for accelerating catalyst design for producing fuels and chemicals, highlighting the largest technical challenges and industrial opportunities. Specific successes and challenges in the design of enzymes and other macromolecular catalysts will be compared and contrasted to efforts to apply AI to develop small molecule organic and inorganic catalysts in the overall context of growing the bioeconomy.
Better Data Fuels Better AI: Transforming Noisy Bioprocess Data into Decision-Ready Insights - Tom Treynor, CEO, R2DIO
Antheia is a commercial-stage pharmaceutical ingredient manufacturer using advanced biosynthesis to build a more resilient supply chain. R2DIO is a software and services company that accelerates bioproduct development by making decision-critical R&D and QC data AI-ready. Antheia had invested heavily in data analytics infrastructure to improve yield and cost efficiency through strain improvement and fermentation process development. However, close inspection revealed that noisy data was slowing progress. Antheia's leadership made improving the precision and reliability of their bioprocess data a priority. In this presentation, we describe how our collaboration achieved a >10X increase in R&D return-on-investment by diagnosing and controlling the causes of unexplained variation in fermentation KPIs. A key finding was that many critical measurements and metadata needed to improve KPI accuracy were not being captured by any of Antheia's instruments. This represents a critical blind spot in Industrial Biotech, where the prevailing practice has been to drive analytics and AI initiatives using instrument data alone. By identifying missing fermentation, sample preparation, and HPLC measurements — then streamlining their capture and transformation — R2DIO enabled Antheia to reduce process variation >3X and increase R&D ROI by >10X, using the same team and equipment, with no new FTEs or capital expenditures.