Imperial College London has won a £10 ($16)-million grant to set up a new translational center aimed at integrating academic and industry research in synthetic biology. Known as SynbiCITE, the London-based center is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and Technology Strategy Board. So far, the new center brings together 17 other UK universities with 13 corporate partners, including heavy hitters such as Microsoft, GlaxoSmithKline, Syngenta, Shell and Agilent Technologies, as well as small-to-medium enterprises. According to SynbiCITE's co-director, Paul Freemont, the research will be focused and milestone-driven in a close collaboration with industry partners to reflect their needs. He predicts that industry will be most interested in new products and tools that speed up pathway engineering, bringing the latest genomic and metagenomic information to bear on the problem of producing useful materials quickly and to scale. Stephen Laderman, director of the Molecular Tools Laboratory at Agilent Technologies, says that the new venture is exciting and that industry is keen to engage, with the expectation that engineered organisms, components and design methods with innovative applications will result. Companies, he notes, are already benefitting from synthetic biology advances, especially in the area of bioprocessing. Freemont says that the venture is open to other partners who did not come in on the first round. All partners, industrial as well as academic, commit to fund the venture both in cash and in kind. Although it is impossible to predict the most successful outputs, Freemont says that by working closely together, academic and industrial researchers can ensure commercial needs are aligned with the research. Last year, synthetic biology was included as a priority in the UK government's science package for 2015 (Nat. Biotechnol. 31, 93, 2013).