Biotechnology’s advances, new discoveries, new rules

The ability to engineer biology is opening new possibilities across the global economy, as scientists are gaining new ways to produce medicines and materials that can combat disease and address environmental problems.

The economic stakes are considerable. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimated in a December 2025 policy brief that the global bioeconomy is already worth between $4 trillion and $5 trillion and could reach $30 trillion by 2050.

“Biotechnology has developed considerably over the past few decades,” Dr. Felix Moronta Barrios of the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, a United Nations-affiliated research organization that advances biotechnology research and training, told The Beiruter. 

There is now a strong emphasis on community engagement and co-development with national and regional partners. Better regulation and greater preparedness for the future are all part of that shift.

As AI shortens the time needed to design biological tools and researchers gain the ability to engineer organisms with greater precision, the constraints are shifting toward the infrastructure needed to develop them, the countries and communities able to participate and regulatory systems built for an earlier technological era.

Programming living systems

Synthetic biology, which uses engineering techniques to design or modify biological systems, is giving scientists new ways not only to alter individual organisms but to influence how genetic traits move through entire populations.

One critical area of research, Moronta Barrios explains, is the development of gene drives, which increase the likelihood that a particular genetic modification will be inherited beyond the roughly 50% probability associated with normal Mendelian inheritance.

“Because mosquitoes are vectors of both human and animal diseases, there is a very active field of research exploring how genetically modified mosquitoes could be used to control the diseases they transmit,” Moronta Barrios said.

The potential public-health implications are substantial. The World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report 2025 estimated 282 million malaria cases and 610,000 deaths in 2024, with Africa accounting for about 95% of deaths. WHO is already assessing gene-drive approaches intended to reduce pathogen transmission, although gene-drive mosquitoes have not yet been released into the wild.

Gene drives, however, are not equally suited to every species. Researchers have made greater progress with malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquitoes, for example, than with Aedes, which can transmit dengue. Scientists are also exploring gene drives for agricultural pests and invasive rodents, opening potential applications across human disease, agriculture and biodiversity conservation.

Biology meets artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is allowing scientists to analyze vast amounts of biological data and design new molecules far more quickly.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold has predicted more than 200 million protein structures, covering nearly all proteins catalogued by science. By late 2025, its database had been used by more than 3 million researchers across more than 190 countries.

“As a biologist, I see AI solving problems almost every week that might have taken biologists 10 or 15 years to solve,” Moronta Barrios said. 

One of AI’s great strengths is its capacity to analyze enormous amounts of data. Scientists are already taking advantage of that in AI-assisted biodesign, including the design of proteins, antibodies, toxins, and drugs.

AI is also moving from analyzing biology to helping scientists design it. In a 2025 study published in Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific journals, researchers trained AI models on more than 1 million naturally occurring CRISPR systems to design new gene-editing tools. One of them, OpenCRISPR-1, successfully edited human DNA and performed as well as or better than a widely used CRISPR system on measures of activity and precision.

Who gets to build biotechnology?

Advanced biotechnology remains geographically uneven, dependent on specialized equipment, trained scientists and substantial investment. While research remains concentrated in hubs such as the United States and United Kingdom, international collaborations are giving scientists elsewhere a larger role in its development.

“There are still major hubs for biotechnology research, but development has become much more decentralized,” Moronta Barrios said.

The purpose of this decentralization is to develop the technology where it will actually be used. This model is no longer about exporting technology. It is about co-developing it.

Gene drives, for instance, provide a scientific reason for developing technologies locally. Mosquito populations in southern Europe differ genetically from those in sub-Saharan Africa, so an intervention developed for one cannot simply be transferred to another. Developing the technology locally therefore means adapting it not only to the organism being engineered, but to the community in which it may eventually be released.

Regulation after the categories blur

Biotechnology regulation was built around distinctions such as genetically modified or not, laboratory use or environmental release, and research or commercialization. New technologies are making those categories harder to separate.

A single research process can now combine AI-assisted biological design, synthetic biology, and genome editing before producing an organism intended for environmental release. Gene drives pose an additional challenge because living organisms can reproduce and move across political borders, raising questions about which jurisdiction should determine acceptable risk.

Writing separate regulations for every new technique risks creating rules that become obsolete as the underlying science changes.

“The problem is not that regulation is absent. Regulations exist, but they tend to be very technology-specific and slow to adapt,” Moronta Barrios said. 

We are witnessing an acceleration in innovation while still having regulatory conversations about how to adapt to those advances.

For technologies that may eventually be released into a shared environment, however, adaptability is only part of the challenge. Regulation must also account for the communities that will live with their consequences

“Engagement with society is crucial because society will ultimately be the recipient of a technology,” Moronta Barrios said. 

Regulations cannot simply be imported from one country or jurisdiction to another because local contexts are completely different. Communities should feel a sense of shared ownership over the regulatory framework.

Governments therefore face competing pressures. Slow regulation can leave institutions chasing the science, while excessive restrictions can suppress research and make it harder for countries without established biotechnology industries to build capacity of their own.

As the cost and speed of biological design fall, scientific capability alone will not determine where biotechnology advances. The countries best positioned to benefit may be those that can build the institutions, expertise and public trust needed to turn scientific possibility into something that can actually be used.