Resilient crops and sustainable materials: The EIC’s 2025 biotech challenge

19th June 2025 at 3:54 pm

The EIC Pathfinder Challenge 2025 “Biotech for Climate Resilient Crops and Plant-Based Biomanufacturing” (HORIZON-EIC-2025-PATHFINDERCHALLENGES-01-01) sets out a grand ambition: to create climate-resilient plants and transform them into platforms for producing valuable bio-based compounds. With an indicative budget of around €30 million and an expected 7–8 projects to be funded, the European Innovation Council (EIC) is calling on biotech pioneers, synthetic biologists, plant engineers and agrifood innovators to push the boundaries of what crops can do for food security, sustainability and bioeconomy.

What kind of systems is the EIC looking for?

Climate extremes are threatening the foundations of agriculture. This Challenge calls for radical new biotechnological tools to confer resilience traits across plant species, such as desiccation or salt tolerance. Proposals must go beyond incremental gene editing to explore cross-species solutions, novel delivery systems, synthetic biology, and extremophile biology. Successful projects will lay the groundwork for more sustainable and robust crops with the potential to reshape food systems and enable plant-based alternatives to fossil-based materials. Regulatory awareness and ecological soundness are essential.

This Pathfinder Challenge seeks radically novel biotechnological systems that enhance plant performance under environmental stress while enabling plant-based biomanufacturing. The focus is not on incremental improvements, but on disruptive approaches that reimagine how crops behave, grow and produce valuable materials. The systems should aim to:

• Introduce cross-species resilience traits like desiccation, heat, or salt tolerance
• Enable plants to serve as biofactories for fuels, chemicals, and biomaterials
• Leverage extremophile biology, synthetic biology, and novel gene delivery tools
• Integrate bioproduction with crop resilience, not treat them as separate goals

What’s different? The EIC isn’t looking for single-gene edits or tweaks to existing crops. It wants biotech platforms that combine resilience, modular production capacity and regulatory foresight with long-term impact on agriculture and circular bioeconomy models.

Pro tip: Your concept should integrate biotechnology, plant physiology, synthetic pathway engineering and regulatory insight. Do not treat these as silos.

How to hit the Challenge: the two complementary objectives

To be considered in scope, each proposal must address both of the Challenge’s core objectives:

Objective 1: Engineering crop resilience to abiotic stress

This part of the Challenge focuses on developing radically novel biotech approaches to improve crop performance under extreme environmental conditions such as drought, heat, or salinity. Projects are expected to go beyond conventional breeding or single-gene edits. Solutions should aim to:

• Introduce cross-species or synthetic resilience traits that do not naturally exist in the target crop
• Develop new genetic tools, including synthetic biology circuits, regulatory elements, or extremophile genes
• Explore non-GMO or non-transgenic delivery systems such as synthetic epigenetic editing, plant-compatible nanostructures, or engineered endophytes
• Demonstrate the function of these traits under controlled environmental stress conditions

Objective 2: Enabling plant-based biomanufacturing

The second objective targets the use of crops as biological production platforms. The goal is to enable the decentralised and sustainable synthesis of fuels, chemicals, or materials within the plant itself. Proposals should focus on:

• Reprogramming metabolic pathways to produce high-value compounds that are difficult to obtain through traditional methods
• Integrating biosynthetic capabilities without compromising plant growth or survival under stress
• Demonstrating a proof-of-concept at TRL 4, showing both stress resilience and productive capacity in one system
• Prioritising plant chassis with scalable or field-relevant potential

Pro tip: Align your biological targets and delivery technologies across both objectives. A project that combines new-to-nature resilience traits with integrated bioproduction in the same plant system will be seen as more strategically valuable to the EIC’s vision.

What makes a strong proposal?

To be competitive, your proposal should:

• Include a mechanistic understanding of traits or production routes
• Target TRL 4 (experimental proof-of-concept in relevant environment)
• Consider ecological safety, scalability and regulatory frameworks
• Demonstrate the selective advantage of the trait or output under stress
• Explore delivery mechanisms that are safe, efficient and reproducible

Pro tip: Show how your technology breaks out of conventional crop biotech and charts a new technical, ecological and socioeconomic path.

Application scope and portfolio composition

The EIC expects this Challenge to fund a portfolio of complementary projects, each exploring different combinations of resilience traits, production targets and technical approaches. Proposals should avoid overlap and show how they contribute to a coherent field-building effort. The ideal project mix may include:

• At least one focusing on desiccation tolerance across species
• One using non-transgenic gene delivery tools
• Projects covering different crops or plant types, from model species to climate-relevant cultivars
• Synergies between resilience and production, rather than separate tracks

Pro tip: Show how your consortium will contribute to joint progress, whether through shared metrics, cross-consortium learning or early stakeholder engagement. This is about building a field, not just a prototype.

Turning research ideas into reality together

We at accelopment have successfully supported the preparation of multiple Pathfinder Challenge and Open proposals, including the ongoing PEARL-DNA, BoneOscopy, POLINA, PIONEAR and CORENET projects. With many years of proposal writing experience, we can support you through your application process and during the implementation of your funded Pathfinder Challenge project. Have a look at our Proposal Writing, Project Management and Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation services and contact our EIC Pathfinder experts to discuss how we can best support you with your proposal and ambition.

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Dr. Johannes Ripperger
Research & Innovation Manager

Andreia Cruz
Research & Innovation Project Manager