The BIOFAB: International Open Facility Advancing Biotechnology (BIOFAB) was founded in December 2009 as the world’s first biological design-build facility. This professionally staffed public-benefit facility was initiated by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and is led by bioengineers from UC Berkeley and Stanford University. The BIOFAB is operated in partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), the BioBricks Foundation (BBF), and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC).
BIOFAB projects will be designed to produce broadly useful collections of standard biological parts that can be made freely available to both academic and commercial users, while also enabling the rapid design and prototyping of genetic constructs needed to support specific needs of partner efforts such as SynBERC Testbeds. The BIOFAB will thus also represent the first significant focused investment in the development of open technology platforms underlying and supporting the next generation of biotechnology. The BIOFAB has been operating for almost one full year and is now focused on mapping the “Central Dogma” of E-Coli. We are making concrete progress, getting results that have not been duplicated elsewhere to date. Our objective is to complete the C-Dog for E-Coli and then to do the same for other organisms. Our intention to contribute all scientific results of the BIOFAB research to the public domain.
The science and technology coming out of the BIOFAB are revolutionary. But so is the culture being created. Organizations which are rivals and competitors in the greater world come together at the BIOFAB, freely contributing knowledge and resources, and donating all products created through the BIOFAB back into the public domain.
The BBF runs the Founding Industrial Sponsors project of the BIOFAB, which brings for-profit companies into the work of the BIOFAB. These companies contribute financial support and they gain a seat at the table where they can gain rapid, firsthand knowledge of the discoveries of the BIOFAB.
Current BIOFAB Founding Industrial Sponsors include Agilent Technologies, Genencor, DSM, and Scild Innovations.
For more information about sponsoring the BIOFAB, contact holly@biobricks.org.
