Foundation models, virtual cells, AI-designed molecules, and the companies putting them to work.

Biology is becoming an industrial platform, competing on performance rather than virtue.

It starts with what we eat: alternative proteins and precision fermentation ingredients answering land constraints, climate volatility, and demand for alternatives to animal agriculture. Upstream, engineered traits and biological inputs are pushing yield and resilience without proportionally more land, water, or chemistry. Further out, bio-based routes are displacing petroleum in chemicals, plastics, materials, and fuels, increasingly matching or beating incumbents on the metrics buyers actually care about. In personal care, biotech-derived ingredients are replacing synthetic and animal-derived inputs in a category consumers are actively reshaping. And at the extraction end, engineered organisms are recovering critical minerals and remediating contamination at a fraction of the chemical and ecological cost.

This theme follows biology out of the lab and into supply chains, and asks the question that decides everything: can it scale, and can it compete on price?