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The pressure on food and health systems to adapt — quickly and at scale — is intensifying. From vaccines and diagnostics to crop genetics, fermentation and biologicals, innovation across the bioeconomy is reshaping how food is produced, protected and delivered.
These themes were explored during a recent Innovation Forum webinar, sponsored by the Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA), which brought together leaders from industry and research to examine where bioscience is already delivering real-world impact — and what it will take to scale those solutions further.
Setting the scene: pressure, potential, and Iowa’s role
Across food, health and industrial value chains, pressure is intensifying to deliver systems that are:
- More resilient to climate volatility, disease and labour constraints
- Lower impact in terms of land use, water use and greenhouse gas emissions
- Affordable and accessible for producers and consumers
Bioscience sits at the centre of many of the most promising solutions — from advanced breeding and gene editing to fermentation, biologicals, vaccines and diagnostics. Yet the pathway from discovery to scale remains fragmented, shaped by regulation, economics and public perception.
The webinar used the state of Iowa in the United States as a lens on this challenge. As a hub where land-grant universities, global agribusinesses and public agencies are tightly interconnected, the state was positioned as a living “testbed” for bioscience innovation.
Despite their different positions in the value chain, the panellists found common ground on several shared realities:
- Innovation cycles are long, particularly in regulated sectors
- Regulatory complexity and lack of global harmonisation slow deployment
- Adoption ultimately depends on economic value and operational practicality
Where innovation is delivering impact today
Speakers shared concrete examples where bioscience is already improving productivity, resilience and sustainability.
Vaccines and diagnostics: accelerating translation at Iowa State University
Mike Roof outlined how Iowa has prioritised four bioscience platforms where it aims to be globally competitive:
- Bio-based chemicals
- Digital and precision agriculture
- Medical devices
- Vaccines, diagnostics and immunotherapeutics
Iowa State University’s role, he explained, is to shorten the distance between discovery and deployment by:
- Steering basic research toward commercially viable applications
- Supporting entrepreneurs and early-stage companies
- Helping companies navigate US regulatory systems
- Connecting industry with primary federal animal health infrastructure, which is located in Iowa
This translational focus is designed to reduce time lost between lab-scale innovation and regulated, market-ready products.
Animal health and nutrition: Kemin’s shift from nutrition to health
Pat Wood described a deliberate strategic shift at Kemin from a predominantly nutrition-focused portfolio toward animal health.
Key examples included:
- Becoming majority owner of MeVac, a vaccine producer in Egypt, and acquiring Hennessy Research Associates in the US to build vaccine capabilities at scale.
- Deploying avian influenza vaccines in North Africa and the Middle East informed by strains circulating along the Nile migratory pathway, helping preserve large numbers of birds that would otherwise be lost.
- Expanding investment in plant-based ingredient production — including rosemary, marigolds, oregano and potatoes — to reduce reliance on synthetic alternatives.
Wood emphasised that these moves were driven by focus and urgency, with acquisitions enabling faster scale-up than organic development alone.
Fermentation and the bioeconomy: Cargill’s resource-efficient ingredients
Steve Montgomery framed the bioeconomy as the use of renewable, nature-based resources — from crops and microorganisms to waste streams — to produce food, materials and energy.
An example discussed was Eversweet, a zero-calorie stevia sweetener produced via fermentation through Cargill’s joint venture with dsm-firmenich. By using specially designed yeast to produce only the sweetest steviol glycosides, the product delivers sugar-like taste without bitterness.
Measured outcomes include:
- Up to 96% lower land use
- 97% less water use
- 81% lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to sugar or plant-grown stevia
Montgomery noted that fermentation enables companies to replicate what plants do naturally, but in a controlled, scalable manufacturing environment that meets both sustainability and customer formulation needs.
Crop genetics and biologics: Corteva’s farmer-centric lens
Sam Eathington explained that Corteva’s innovation strategy is anchored in solving farmer-defined problems, rather than developing technology for its own sake.
Examples included:
- Using gene editing to more rapidly assemble existing disease-resistance traits in plants, giving growers crops resistant to multiple diseases while potentially reducing fungicide use.
- Expanding investment in biologics and natural products, including widely used organic insecticides, to complement conventional chemistry, change residue profiles and broaden production options.
Eathington highlighted how disease pressure and weather volatility are shifting rapidly, making speed of innovation increasingly critical.
- New corn diseases, such as tar spot and southern rust, are causing yield losses of up to 30%–40% in affected regions without effective genetic resistance or protection strategies.
- The role of biotech traits in enabling no-till systems at scale in the US, reducing soil erosion and labour demands — even as these technologies continue to face public and legal opposition.
What’s needed next: Enabling factors: regulation, AI, and measurement
Beyond individual technologies, speakers highlighted system-level enablers that determine whether bioscience innovations scale.
Regulation: safeguard and constraint
Across the panel, regulation was described as both essential and misaligned:
- Developing a biotech trait may take four to five years but securing approvals across 25–30 countries can add another decade.
- Speakers called for more harmonised, science-based regulation for gene editing, biologics and natural products that reflects their different and distinct risk profiles.
- Mike Roof pointed to the US Center for Veterinary Biologics’ “prescription vaccines” model as an example of regulatory innovation that allows faster follow-on approvals once a platform is licensed.
AI and computational tools
AI and machine learning are already reshaping discovery across sectors by:
- Enabling whole-genome sequences of hosts and pathogens;
- Predicting protein–receptor interactions; and,
- Prioritising vaccine and biologic targets with a higher probability of success.
Both Roof and Montgomery noted that AI is accelerating early-stage discovery, shifting bottlenecks further downstream into regulation, manufacturing and scale-up.
Measuring sustainability and “health of nature”
Speakers stressed the importance of credible measurement:
- Life-cycle assessments are increasingly standard for new products, quantifying land use, water use and greenhouse gas emissions across supply chains.
- Agricultural inputs are among the most heavily tested products on the market, with extensive environmental fate, biodiversity and non-target assessments.
- Eathington noted that Corteva has committed that all new pipeline products must meet defined sustainable innovation goals aligned with UN criteria, verified through third-party audit.
- Wood highlighted growing customer demand for microbiome-friendly health and nutrition solutions, particularly as the industry looks to reduce its use of antibiotics while maintaining healthy herds.
Understanding farmer needs — through an industry lens
From the industry and research perspective, key constraints shaping farmer decision-making include:
- Economics: innovations must deliver reliable returns on investment to be viable.
- Labour: chronic labour shortages make complex or labour-intensive practices increasingly impractical.
- Risk and volatility: climate variability and shifting pest and disease pressures are raising the cost of failure.
Eathington, who grew up on a family farm, noted that many practices once taken for granted — such as multiple tillage passes per season — are no longer feasible, reinforcing demand for technologies that simplify operations while protecting yields.
What’s needed next: focus, partnerships, and talent
In closing, speakers reflected on what the bioscience ecosystem needs to move faster from promise to impact. The ideas shared included:
- Sharper focus, concentrating investment on a smaller number of high-impact areas;
- Science-based decision-making in policy, regulation and public debate;
- Stronger public–private collaboration, with universities such as Iowa State acting as commercialisation partners, not just research centres; and,
- Talent development across R&D, engineering, manufacturing and commercial roles, identified by multiple speakers as a key constraint on scale.
Next steps
The conversation highlighted how progress in bioscience depends as much on system design as on scientific breakthroughs. Access to applied research, regulatory clarity, manufacturing capability and skilled talent all shape how quickly innovations move from discovery to deployment.
While Iowa provided a useful case study for this conversation, the challenges raised — long development timelines, fragmented regulation and the need for clearer value signals for end users — are shared across regions. Addressing them will require closer alignment between industry, research institutions and policymakers, as well as sustained attention to practical implementation rather than technology alone.
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Agriculture 
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