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​
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: India Hook-Barnard, CEO, Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC)
Speakers:
California Institute of Technology
Program Officer, Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) Directorate
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Advancing the bioeconomy requires more than scientific discovery alone. It depends on effective collaboration among academic researchers generating new knowledge, companies translating innovation into scalable products and processes, and government institutions providing funding, infrastructure, policy, and regional support. This panel will aim to examine how these sectors can work together more effectively to move biobased technologies from research and development through commercialization and manufacturing. Drawing on perspectives from academia, industry, federal government, and regional economic development, panelists will discuss the distinct roles each sector plays, the barriers that often prevent promising technologies from advancing, and the partnerships and institutional models that can help close those gaps. The session will explore questions including how public research investments can better support commercial translation, how industry can engage earlier with academic innovators, how regional organizations can connect companies with infrastructure and talent, and how government programs can reduce risk while strengthening domestic biomanufacturing capacity. Through practical examples and lessons from existing collaborations, the panel will identify opportunities to better align incentives, resources, and timelines across sectors. The discussion will offer attendees actionable insights into building partnerships that accelerate innovation, expand manufacturing, and support a more resilient and competitive biobased economy.
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
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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.