Emerging areas

Perpetual Flight

Programme Director: Rico Chandra

Range is a primary constraint on intra-atmospheric flight today. Birds, however, have shown the ability to stay aloft for months by harnessing atmospheric energy sources. There is no fundamental reason why machines shouldn’t outperform birds in long endurance flight.

• How can we design aircraft that can reliably find thermals and wind shear, harvest energy from them, and interlace these into long unpowered flight paths?

• Could perpetual endurance aviation unlock benefits in sensing and communications far beyond what satellite technology has delivered?

• How can cutting edge modelling, sensors, and robotics enable machines to prospect for and exploit environmental sources of energy in new ways?

Collective Intelligence Engine

Programme Director: Nicole Wheeler

The world’s most important discoveries are buried in millions of disconnected papers. What if AI could map every scientific argument — instantly revealing breakthroughs, contradictions, and gaps? By building a living knowledge engine to connect ideas across disciplines, we can unlock faster cures, smarter policies, and trillion-pound innovations.

• How can AI extract, verify, and connect scientific claims across disciplines to uncover hidden connections, illuminate disagreement, and accelerate discovery?

• How does turning fragmented research into structured, living intelligence reshape how society trusts, funds, and applies scientific knowledge?

• How can AI, linguistics, epistemology, data visualisation and network science combine to make science more transparent, accessible, and actionable?

Molecular Fabricators

Programme Director: Ivan Jayapurna

Materials shape society: our lived environments, productivity, mobility, health, and even culture. We’ve seen multiple digital and biological revolutions over the past half century, but everyday materials and manufacturing have only incrementally changed. It’s time to move past the plastic age into a new era of abundant, resilient, bioharmonious materials.

• Can we program stochasticity and heterogeneity, as nature does, to fabricate ‘living’ (adaptive and resilient) synthetic materials?

• Are molecular fabricators the key to moving beyond our fragile, inefficient, supply chains towards secure, sustainable, on-demand production of food, goods, and medicine?

• By combining advances in biology (synthetic, plant, and myco-), AI, nanotechnology, and additive manufacturing, could we fabricate ‘living’ matter with the speed, throughput and versatility of plastic?

Secured by Nature

Programme Director: Alex Obadia

Humans and technology are fusing in profound ways. Mobile phones have become an extension of ourselves, GPS our external sense of direction. In the future, non-invasive brain-computer interfaces might give us new senses, bio 3d printers produce the exact compounds our bodies require. To enable a safe and valuable human-technology fusion, we’ll need a new generation of information security tools that provide protection beyond the digital realm.

• What if we harnessed physical and biological laws to design security primitives – like genetic physically unclonable functions or entanglement-based device independence – to minimise new information security risks natively?

• What new valuable protocols could we build with these primitives? And what would they unlock when complemented with protocols from the digital world in a unified system?

• What kind of insights could we surface if we brought together security researchers – such as programmable cryptography designers – with experts in the natural sciences to dig into this problem space?

Extending Our Perception

Programme Director: Claire Donoghue

Our AI models excel where they mimic human senses and cognition. What if we break free of that limitation? AI that transcends human sensory perception could unlock discoveries beyond our reach and new capabilities like detecting diseases before symptoms or advancing sustainable food production.

• Can we sense and predict things previously impossible for humans by creating AI systems capable of fusing diverse sensory data to yield insights from cutting edge sensors or capabilities inspired by other species?

• What if we could transform sensory perception for health; predict chronic conditions early, enabling tailored interventions for more healthy, productive years of life whilst reducing pressure on the NHS?

• What valuable new sensors, data sets, and capabilities are waiting to be uncovered at the interface of AI, engineering, application domains (medicine, robotics, agriculture), business model innovations and design thinking?

Engineering Life's Energy

Programme Director: Nathan Wolfe

Science has decoded the genetic blueprint but not mastered the energy that brings it to life. Recent advances in cellular biology and bioengineering provide the foundation for reprogramming cellular energy. By systematically engineering biological energy production and transfer, we can revolutionise therapeutics, biotechnology, and potentially create entirely new industrial applications for climate, agriculture, energy and beyond.

• How can we develop technologies that precisely control energy production and utilisation in biology, enabling applications from disease treatments & healthspan extension to novel energy-generating platforms & bio-hybrid devices?

• What would it mean for human health and technology if we could programme cellular energy systems as precisely as we edit genes?

• How might recent breakthroughs in cellular biology be combined with synthetic biology, advanced delivery technologies (e.g. lipid nanoparticles, cell-penetrating peptides, targeted exosomes), and cellular bioenergetics to engineer energy production in cells or other applications?

Predicting Evolution

Programme Director: Yannick Wurm

By anticipating rather than reacting to evolution, we could transform medicine, agriculture, and biotechnology. Evolutionary theory is robust, yet standard models often fail to predict specific trajectories in complex systems. Recent breakthroughs indicate that evolution follows more hidden rules than previously understood. How pervasive are these rules of life, and could we unravel them?

• What are the fundamental limits to being able to predict evolution for complex systems, and how close can AI get us?

• What if we could outpace pathogens and cancer, eliminate pests, massively boost agricultural yields and climate-resilience, and spawn transformative industries?

• How might AI integrate massive datasets across population genetics, experimental evolution, and eco-evolutionary dynamics to decipher evolution's hidden logic?

Sculpting Innate Immunity

Programme Director: Brian Wang

The innate immune system is a critical regulator of health, yet we lack sophisticated tools to modulate it. Medicines that precisely program the innate immune system—the body’s first line of defence—could transform how we tackle cancer, infectious disease, autoimmune disease, and more.

• How can we engineer medicines that enable precise biological, spatial, and temporal control over innate immune responses?

• Could we create entire new classes of medicines today that are as transformative as vaccines were in the 20th century?

• Could AI-guided immune profiling distinguish healthy from diseased states—and could synthetic biology engineer solutions bridging the gap?

Proactive Biodefence

Programme Director: Nicole Wheeler

What if the next pandemic never happens? Today, we wait until outbreaks spread before acting. Advances in AI-driven detection, risk prediction, response planning and distributed manufacturing of countermeasures could allow us to move faster than pandemics, rewriting the rules of global health security.

• Can we design a self-improving system that detects unknown pathogens, predicts their risk, and autonomously delivers countermeasures—before they spread?

• What if real-time outbreak prevention became as fundamental as cybersecurity—protecting lives, stabilising economies, and creating a new trillion-dollar industry?

• Can AI, genomics, epidemiology, network theory, and decision science create an autonomous biosecurity system that is effective, transparent, and resistant to misuse?

Ocean Biomanufacturing

Programme Director: Ivan Jayapurna

The ocean covers over 70% of our planet, and although we've long marvelled at its ability to produce abundant biomass and extraordinary materials, from seaweed to pearls, it remains vastly underutilised for materials and manufacturing. Now is the time for the age of ocean biomanufacturing, this time with sustainability baked in from the start.

• What stands in the way of scalable ocean biomanufacturing – low-trophic aquaculture infrastructure? Salt-tolerant catalysts? Energy?

• As we explore the ocean as a new frontier for agriculture, mining, and manufacturing, what high-value foods, materials, and feedstocks could we sustainably cultivate?

• Can marine and synthetic biologists collaborate with materials scientists, industrial designers, and manufacturing experts to design in-ocean bioreactors that harness organisms big and small to fabricate the materials society needs at scale?

Unlocking Superorganismal Secrets

Programme Director: Yannick Wurm

Over millions of years, ant, bee, and termite superorganisms have developed extraordinary capabilities: queens with 100-fold greater lifespans than their siblings, decades-long sperm storage without refrigeration, and disease resilience despite crowded conditions. Reverse-engineering the molecular-genetic innovations of superorganisms could transform human health and well-being.

• Which mechanisms enable the impressive capabilities of different lineages of superorganisms? How could we translate their solutions to human health?

• What if we could pause ageing, revolutionise fertility and organ transport, and uncover hidden new categories of anti-virals and antibiotics?

• How can aging researchers, reproductive specialists, and immunologists collaborate with entomologists to translate solutions from superorganisms into breakthroughs for humanity?