For decades, pharmaceutical supply chains were optimized for cost and scale, stretching across continents to source critical active ingredients. But fragility has made resilience a strategic imperative. Synthetic biology offers a new model: onshoring the production of essential APIs by programming cells to manufacture small molecules, peptides, and novel amino acids with precision and scalability. Instead of relying on distant chemical supply networks, biology becomes the factory—flexible, distributed, and programmable. This session explores how engineered microbes and directed evolution platforms are rebuilding pharma supply chains from the molecular level up, enabling secure, responsive, and locally anchored production of the medicines the world depends on.

For billions of years, evolution has been biology’s most powerful search engine. Now researchers are beginning to redesign that engine itself. From orthogonal replication systems like OrthoRep to synthetic genomes, programmable mutation systems, and continuous evolution platforms, new tools are making it possible to evolve biological function with unprecedented speed, control, and scale. This session explores how synthetic evolution is becoming a core technology of programmable biology. Speakers will examine how engineered replication, genome-scale design, and AI-informed selection strategies are expanding the range of molecules, pathways, and phenotypes that can be discovered in the lab. By moving from passively observing evolution to actively directing it, scientists are opening a new frontier where genomes are not just edited, but built and evolved as programmable systems.