The National Biofilms Innovation Centre (NBIC), Center for Biofilm Engineering (CBE), Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE), COST AMiCI Consortium, and the ESCMID Study Group for Biofilms (ESGB) have launched am international, community-wide call to identify emerging issues in science, innovation and policy for the biofilm field.

The international group are calling for support from the biofilm community to help identify important questions that, if answered, will make a considerable impact on the fundamentals of the field of microbial biofilms, to innovation in technologies and other approaches to prevent, detect, manage and engineer biofilms. Such exercises can play a critical role in bridging the gap between the data generated by researchers, and the information needed by policymakers to make funding or regulatory decisions.

Questions can be submitted via the short online form before 31 March 2021.

All submissions will be pre-screened for duplication before being grouped into themes when the call closes in March. Thematic focus groups including scientists from research and industry, policymakers and other stakeholders, will meet to organise subsets of related questions and finalise a set of priority questions to form the basis for a position paper, which will be published as a resource for the field. This is expected to help set the agenda for future research in the field of microbial biofilms as well as have impact in areas of policy and outreach.