This year's iGEM winners tackled a rather abstract information processing task, but many of the projects had direct health applications. In addition to the bactoblood and HIV project, there was a heart stem cell project, non-antibiotic resistant bacteria, a detection system for infections, and more.

I asked Jeff Way of Merck KGaA in Germany, who was at the Jamboree as a judge, whether pharma and biotech companies were starting to apply synthetic biology approaches to drug development. Way (who cowrote an article on synthetic biology for The Scientist) said that with the first wave of innovative biotech products going off-patent, industry sorely needs some new ideas, but he didn't think the jump into synthetic biology was on the immediate horizon. "The design principles here have huge potential, but it's not really being realized," he said, in part because the mentality is still largely dominated by chemical synthesis of fairly simple molecules. A new mindset, he said, will have to come from a wave of new companies and a younger generation of biological engineers.

Leonard Katz, the research director of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), a multi-institutional NISF-funded effort to develop the field of synthetic biology, said that one of SynBERC?s immediate missions is to reach out to industry and to promote the field's potential both for the discovery of novel drugs and production methods.

But with synthetic biology's stress on an open-source Registry of Biological Parts, what about the intellectual property issues?

The Berkeley group's presentation on bactoblood was the only one I saw that raised the question directly. In addition to the requisite biology and engineering students on the team, one member was an anthropology major, who was tasked with researching how the invention could be patented. The answer is, it's unclear. During the question and answer session, MIT's Drew Endy asked the team, how do you build a patented device from open source parts? "They didn't have an answer for that," he said later. "My answer is, you can't."

But inventions that are commercially important will be patented, Way said. "If you want to go over to the dark side, you have to live with the restrictions." He predicts a two-track system, in which companies would simply have to synthesize their own cellular parts. With the cost of synthesis so low, this would barely make a dent in company budgets, he noted.

Indeed, that divide is already happening within privately funded projects in academia, pointed out Berkeley's Adam Arkin (and bactoblood's faculty advisor). For example, the University of California recently received more than $600 million in funding from BP and the Department of Energy for bioenergy research, which will certainly involve synthetic biology. But the funders retain some IP rights, so researchers working on those projects simply won't be able to use biobrick parts, Arkin said.

I expect many of these ideas will be discussed in the next two days as the meeting turns to workshops; a session on legal standards is slated for Tuesday. I'll have to learn about it later, though, since I've returned to Philadelphia.