Biotechnology is enabling a new generation of ingredients that elevate both product performance and sustainability. In this fireside chat, leaders from Procter & Gamble will discuss how biotech is being applied across key material classes to enhance consumer products, highlighting innovations behind their latest Native launch and emerging bio-derived ingredients for hair and beauty. The conversation will also explore how biotech platforms are helping shape the future of high-performing, sustainable consumer goods.

Surfactants (the molecules that power cleaning, foaming, emulsifying, and conditioning in everyday products) are entering a new era of innovation. Advances in bio-engineering are enabling the design of next-generation surfactants with enhanced performance and reduced environmental impact. By leveraging biologically derived and bio-inspired approaches, researchers and product developers are rethinking how these essential ingredients are produced and formulated. New pathways in fermentation, enzyme engineering, and green chemistry are opening opportunities to create surfactants that are not only more effective, but also better aligned with circularity and nature-positive design principles. This session will explore how bio-engineered surfactants are reshaping formulation science: from new production platforms to novel functional properties, and what it will take to scale these innovations into the next generation of sustainable consumer products.

Biologics and engineered proteins have traditionally evolved through cycles of intuition, screening, and incremental optimization. Today, AI is transforming proteins into programmable systems; governed by learnable patterns across activity, stability, expression, specificity, manufacturability, and environmental performance. This shift is unlocking a new generation of biomolecules, from next-generation therapeutics to sustainable enzymes and functional biological systems, that would have been impossible to design by hand. In this session, leaders from biopharma, industrial biotech, machine learning, and protein engineering will explore how multiparameter optimization, generative modeling, and closed-loop experimental validation are reshaping biomolecular design across domains. From clinical biologics to planetary-scale applications, we examine the shift from trial-and-error to predictive, constraint-driven design, and what it means for R&D timelines, scalability, and real-world impact.