UK's Aria grants £30m to 14 biotech projects aimed at helping wildlife adapt

The accelerated adaptation programme is run by Aria, a public body that funds high-risk, high-reward technology. Its goal is to investigate applications that can speed up the evolution of wild species and help them meet new threats such as global warming and disease. The 14 teams will receive grants over the next two years.

Yannick Wurm, director of the accelerated adaptation programme at Aria and a professor of evolutionary genomics at Queen Mary University, London, said the teams will develop tools to protect native British wildlife, including the English oak tree and critical pollinators such as the buff-tailed bumblebee. He said natural environments are changing so rapidly because of the climate crisis and human pressures that many species can no longer adapt quickly enough.

Wurm said the cohort is a first exploration of how biotechnology can responsibly help wild animals and plants overcome challenges they face. The projects are intended to work alongside conventional conservation measures, such as protected reserves, and to give environmentalists a new set of precision tools that Wurm compared to mRNA vaccines for humans.

Among the projects, a team led by researchers at the University of Exeter will use Crispr-Cas9 gene editing on the swallowtail, a butterfly on Britain’s red list of endangered species, to increase its resistance to insecticides widely used on farms. Another project from Rothamsted Research, the 180-year-old agricultural research facility in Hertfordshire, will edit the genes of long-lived tree species such as oaks so they can reproduce in months rather than decades. That could allow them to develop adaptive responses to drought and invasive pathogens more rapidly.

A separate project from Boston-based research lab Cultivarium, in partnership with Imperial College and Queen Mary University, London, would genetically engineer a bacteria that lives on amphibians’ skin to produce proteins that bind and stop infection. Cultivarium co-founder Henry Lee said the approach would not genetically engineer the amphibian itself. The target is chytrid fungal infections, which have caused population declines in more than 500 amphibian species. Chris Thomas, founding director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York, said these infections appear a particularly worthy target for such new approaches and that Aria’s projects offer potentially valuable tools as many species and ecosystems face drought, pathogens and other threats. Thomas is not involved in the Aria programme.

Aria was the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser to Boris Johnson, who said it would fund crazy ideas that could restore Britain’s place as a scientific superpower. The publicly funded body has drawn criticism for research into controversial geoengineering techniques and for grants that have given millions in UK taxpayer money to US tech companies and venture capital firms. Matt Clifford, Aria’s chair, was forced to stand down this month over what one senior MP called a clear conflict of interest after taking a job with Anthropic, the developer of the AI chatbot Claude.

The new conservation work also reflects a wider debate over using biotechnology and gene editing for environmental aims. At the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s world conservation congress last October, more than 90 NGOs raised concerns that these technologies would irreversibly alter natural systems with unpredictable effects. A proposed ban was narrowly rejected after 250 scientists signed an open letter highlighting the potential benefits of synthetic biology, which could allow small islands to eliminate invasive mice that threaten more than 100 birds and reptiles. The IUCN instead adopted its first global policy on synthetic biology, including stringent criteria for proposed solutions.

Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger, chair of the programme’s ethical and social responsibility advisory committee and a professor of international law at the University of Cambridge, said the IUCN policy was one foundation of Aria’s ethical policy. Although the projects are intended for the wild, none of the experimental solutions will be released during the programme, which will last until 2030, she said. She said the decision was made early to have the strongest possible code, and all grantees will work in secure labs.

Editor's Summary

Aria has awarded an initial £30m to 14 projects that use gene editing and biotechnology to help British wildlife adapt to climate change and disease. The programme includes work on endangered butterflies, oak trees and amphibians, while operating under an ethics policy that bars releases during the research phase. The funding comes as conservationists debate the risks and benefits of using synthetic biology in nature.