Biofilms – multispecies communities of microbes which colonise everywhere from the seabed to the International Space Station – are responsible for harms and benefits exceeding $5trn annually (Cámara et al., 2022 - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41522-022-00306-y).

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But we know that many businesses and innovators are attempting to solve these problems with slow, and/or outdated methods... or even relying on trial and error! The UK’s National Biofilm Innovation Centre (https://biofilms.ac.uk) was established in 2018 as a hub to connect cutting-edge research with industrial and societal need. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we used novel automation to scale a virus testing workflow from 100s of samples per week to over 10,000/day, and we’re now applying these lessons to revolutionise the way biofilm applications’ R&D and operations are iterated.

We have become field leaders in detecting characterising beneficial and harmful microbial growth in a range of sectors from fresh produce to fuel pipelines and are exploring how we can deploy our state-of-the-art, automated, near-real-time workflows and data management platforms to help industry and society solve problems or find solutions in bio corrosion, biofouling, or synthesis.