This is an exciting proposal and I would like to express my full support of it. The time is ripe to finally address the challenge of creating life-like features from bottom-up. If successful, this would not only be a huge intellectual achievement, but also would open up the door to a large range of very interesting and useful applications. I am convinced that this can be achieved by bringing together the recent advances in soft matter physics, biophysics, cell biology, systems biology and synthetic biology in a Europe-wide effort. A flagship format would be ideal for such a project. As a theoretical biophysicist, I would also like to emphasize that recently our theoretical understanding of structure formation and dynamical processes has profited a lot from inspiration by (synthetic) biology, and that in reverse, theory and simulation now could contribute strongly to such an endeavor.