Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) models describe acquisition and utilization of energy in organisms, and have been instrumental in connecting scales of biological integration to solve a number of existing and emerging societal issues such as optimizing food production, improving conservation, optimizing resource use, and understanding effects of pollutants. Currently, DEB models assume acquired energy is immediately stored in the organism, and utilize the kappa-rule to partition energy between reproduction and other processes. The k-rule DEB (kDEB) models excel at capturing long-term effects, but struggle with short-term changes and linking to organism physiology.Integration of a transport network, such as blood, holds promise for overcoming these limitations. A study on marine mammals and an initial study on fish model that incorporates such a network suggest these transport-based DEB models could be widely applicable. While these models hold promise, key challenges to their wide adoption need to be addressed.AdvanDEB project tackles these key challenges: (i) ensuring consistency with established biological principles, (ii) defining clear rules for energy use during reproduction, (iii) testing generality and defining applicability of tDEB, (iv) analyzing relationships between tDEB and other theories, and (v) developing a formal set of assumptions and a unified terminology. AdvanDEB will leverage existing resources like the DEB community's AmP database of 4500 species, conventional analysis, and artificial-neural-network approaches to identify domain of applicability for tDEB, investigate within- and between-phylum generality, and formalize the tDEB theory. Additionally, AdvanDEB may unify DEB theory with the Metabolic Theory of Ecology, thus potentially inducing a paradigm shift in bioenergetics, and opening new avenues of research.