March 24-27, 2026 — Second Annual Meeting

The event was a wonderful opportunity to bring together all UK and Korean partners, to share our latest research and explore new opportunities for future collaboration.

As part of the meeting, we toured the excellent facilities at KAIST and KRIBB, including the K-Biofoundry Beta facility. Seeing first-hand the infrastructure in place, and plans for the K-Biofoundry development, provided opportunities to share key knowledge and expertise as both countries continue to invest in biofoundry development.

We particularly enjoyed hearing from some participants of the research exchange program, who presented updates from their collaborative work projects, including:

Livia Soro, PhD student from Imperial College London, who presented her ongoing work being carried out at the Systems and Synthetic Biology Lab at KAIST into Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron's response toward different media conditions.

Sanghyun Chung, PhD student from KAIST, shared outcomes from his recent placement at Imperial College London where he undertook research to develop synthetic biology tools based on organisms such as Streptomyces.

Seongkun Bak, PhD student from KRIBB, reflected on the experience of undertaking a research placement at the University of Edinburgh with the Edinburgh Genome Foundry, developing a pipeline to analyse mutation effects and developing models to search for further improved protein mutants.

As we continue to grow the Partnership, we were pleased to welcome new partners from Pohang University of Science and Technology, Chonnam National University, Seoul National University, Yeungnam University and Inha University.

We look forward to continuing the important work taking place through this partnership, sharing key knowledge on engineering and synthetic biology and improving biofoundry interoperability.

Our third annual meeting will take place in the UK, location and dates are to be confirmed.