A China-led international collaboration has unveiled Asia's first 10-year roadmap for synthetic cell research, outlining a path toward building artificial single-cell life from scratch. Led by Liu Chenli from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the SynCell Asia Initiative brings together more than 100 laboratories across China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. The roadmap was published in Nature Biotechnology and sets out a two-phase strategy toward creating synthetic cells capable of self-replication.