The Philippines' annual celebration of National Biotechnology Week (NBW) officially started on November 20, 2023, at the SM Seaside City Cebu, with the theme “Empowering Innovation for a Sustainable Future with Biotechnology.” This year's celebration is hosted by the Philippine Agriculture and Fisheries Biotechnology Program (DA Biotech), in collaboration with various public and private institutions in the country. The week-long celebration of NBW will feature a series of events and activities from November 20 to 24, 2023.

Stakeholder and regulator engagement is vital for gene drive research to be successful and helpful to biodiversity conservation, according to Prof. Paul Thomas, Genome Editing Program Director at The University of Adelaide. He mentioned this during the webinar titled Genetic Tools For Conservation and Health: What's The Role of Gene Drives? held on November 16, 2023.

Breakthrough Institute and the Alliance for Science released a report about the economic costs of regulating new genomic techniques in the European Union. The report, titled The €3 Trillion Cost of Saying No: How the EU Risks Falling Behind in the Bioeconomy Revolution, presents that the EU's policies are not up-to-date, classifying gene-edited crops as genetically modified organisms, which is governed by a 2001 regulatory framework.

The European Commission's (EC) proposal for new genomic techniques (NGTs) sparked a number of discussions on the European Union's (EU) Farm to Fork and Biodiversity strategies. In the recent event “New Genomic Techniques – What Lies Ahead?” organized by Euractiv, a panel featured key representatives from the Commission and various EU stakeholders, shedding light on potential policy advancements for the uptake of NGTs in Europe.

Researchers developed a solid purple carrot cultivar, ‘Deep Purple' (‘DPP'), with orange taproots by successfully knocking out DcGST1, a gene strongly linked to anthocyanin pigmentation in carrot taproots. Anthocyanins are pigments that may appear red, purple, blue, or black depending on the pH level. The color of purple carrot taproots is highly dependent on the anthocyanins. Through the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique, the researchers produced a purple carrot cultivar with orange taproots.

Researchers from the Yangtze and Jilin University in China developed a rapid on-site diagnosis method with high sensitivity, specificity, and on-site practicability for detecting grass carp reovirus (GCRV) type 1 in aquatic animals. GCRV poses a significant threat to the aquaculture industry. It causes minimal muscle bleeding and severe intestinal bleeding, which greatly contributes to a high mortality rate in grass carp.

A team of scientists from the United Kingdom led by experts from the University of Nottingham and Imperial College London have constructed a synthetic chromosome as part of a major international project to build the world's first synthetic yeast genome. The work of the UK team is the completion of one of the 16 chromosomes of the yeast genome, which is part of the biggest project ever in synthetic biology; the international synthetic yeast genome collaboration known as 'Sc2.0'.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agencies (EPA), and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) released two documents on the Unified Website for Biotechnology Regulation. The documents are released as a response to President Biden's Executive Order 14081. The first document is a Report on Stakeholder Outreach Related to Ambiguities, Gaps, Uncertainties in Regulation of Biotechnology Under the Coordinated Framework.

According to the Agricultural Plant Biotechnology Association - Agro-Bio, Latin America is close to releasing the first gene-edited potato in the region. According to Dr. Gabriela Massa, a researcher at the Agrobiotechnology Laboratory of the Balcarce Agricultural Experimental Station (INTA) and the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research - CONICET, the gene-edited potato “will be registered as a new variety, and from then on, it will be available to whoever wants to license it.”

Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine explored CRISPR gene editing techniques that can be used for potential treatments of Phenylketonuria (PKU). The two methods may be used for further research in the field of medical applications. Phenylketonuria is a newborn genetic disease that causes the phenylalanine (Phe) amino acid to accumulate in the bloodstream.