The EU Research Commissioner, Maire Geoghegan-Quinn stated that EU research and innovation policy will focus on  global challenges that particularly climate change, energy and resource efficiency, health, and an ageing society. The accent now is on the global societal challenges and on how biotechnology can play a role to address them.

In the future, the EC-US Task Force will focus, amongst others, on:

- Food security and healthier food and the fight against obesity;

- Strengthening knowledge and developing advances in technologies for terrestrial or marine bio mass production for applications in industrial processes and in energy production;

- Detecting, monitoring, and removing environmental pollution;

- Preventing and combating infectious diseases;

- Addressing the emerging field of synthetic biology to find common grounds on scientific and technical issues as well as on governance and ethics in order to promote scientific and social values with the same pace and effort;

- Train the next generation of scientific leaders in biotechnology.  

More on: <http://www.ec-us-biotech2010.org/en/>. 
And http://ec.europa.eu/research/biotechnology/ec-us/index_en.html