Europe’s Unused Power

Europe has the makings of a biopharmaceutical superpower and behaves as if it did not. The science is here, the talent is here, the hospitals and the health data are among the best in the world, and a social model that guarantees care to hundreds of millions gives this market a depth no competitor can match. On paper, Europe should be the world’s champion of medical discovery. In practice, it keeps flinching at the decisions that would let it lead. The problem is not capacity. It is a reluctance to use and retain the power it already holds. 

We are not writing as critics from the outside. We are writing as one of the largest European companies that can see, up close, how much ground the continent has given away, and how much of it could still be won back.

We believe in Europe’s potential, frankly, more than Europe seems to believe in it itself. Around 40,000 of our people work here, and most of our global R&D and manufacturing sits on European soil, e.g. 60% of our production in the EU, Sanofi is the French leading private investor in R&D with €2.5 billion per year.

Record contribution of 6,7 billion euros to France’s trade balance! Above all, with these investments, Sanofi is equipping France and more broadly Europe with the best technologies that guarantee our future sovereignty: advanced chemistry, mRNA, bioproduction. 

Consider the gap between what Europe wants and what it does, three times over.

Europe wants to lead in science and discovery. It funds world-class research, trains brilliant scientists, and produces a fifth of the world’s top biotech publications. Then it lets the results leave. A European biotech with a real asset raises its first rounds at home and hits a wall the moment it needs serious growth capital, because the late-stage money is thin here and deep elsewhere. Over the past six years, 66 out of 67 European biotech that went public listed outside the EU. Manufacturing follows the same drift: when there is no clinical-scale capacity available in Europe for a new biologic or advanced therapy, the early batches are made abroad, and commercial production tends to stay where those batches were made. On top of that, Europe has made its clinical trials among the slowest to launch of any major region – 180 days against 90 days in the US, so the trials that attract investment and bring innovations to European patients increasingly happen elsewhere. A continent that discovers like a superpower and finances, builds and tests like twenty-seven separate economies will keep inventing the future for others to own.

Europe wants fast and early access to innovative medicines and vaccines. Instead it has built the most complex access system in the world. An effective centralised EU regulatory approval process followed by twenty-seven national pricing and reimbursement steps, each defensible on its own, effectively competing against one another rather than pooling their weight into the largest and fastest market on earth attracting innovation.  A new medicine reaches some Europeans in weeks and others after years – and roughly half of newly approved products never become widely available across the Union at all. France is a striking example of this challenge: the median time to access a newly approved medicine is 520 days after EMA approval, and 39% of approved products are simply not available to patients.

The purchasing power of Europe’s health systems is enormous.

Turned into a market attractiveness instrument rather than a brake, on the lead-market logic Europe already implements in other strategic sectors, it could pull investment in faster and more predictable uptake for strategic technologies such as cell and gene therapies, mRNA vaccines, new generations of enzymes and monoclonal antibodies, access decisions in months rather than years, and Joint Clinical Assessment made into a real accelerator of national decisions instead of one more layer.

This need not touch the competence of Member States and asks them to see their own spending as leverage and looks at health as an investment in health and economic security, competitiveness and resilience.

Europe wants strategic autonomy to make its medicines and vaccines. Then it piles up the conditions that make building here harder than building anywhere else. The environmental ambition is not the issue, and Sanofi is not asking Europe to lower it. The issue is that the horizontal rules and the pharmaceutical rules were written in separate rooms. Changing a formulation or a process to meet an environmental requirement can trigger multiple years to change and validate the process with regulators, with fresh clinical data, while regulated prices leave no way to absorb the cost. A company is told to adapt fast, and told by another part of the same system that adapting will take years and cannot be funded. And where competitors move, Europe hesitates. When a strategic project needs a decision, some economies commit within a year and others within months; Europe still takes at best twelve to eighteen months, held back by an old reluctance to back its own companies openly, as though clear industrial support were something to apologise for. By the time Europe answers, the plant has been built somewhere else, with more support and attractive market conditions.

Every one of these is a choice, not a fate. And the encouraging part is that Europe has started, hesitantly, to make some of them. The Critical Medicines Act now lets public buyers reward European manufacturing rather than chase the lowest price alone, which is the beginning of a genuine European preference. That preference will work only if it is real and proportionate, anchored in actual European presence rather than spread across a broad set of partners, coherent across the Union rather than a patchwork of national schemes, and paired with a market that gives companies a reason to invest here in the first place. The current and upcoming Biotech Acts, as well as the long expected Capital Markets Union are the moment to turn these first steps into a coherent competitive whole: capital that lets companies scale at home, competitive intellectual property framework, attractive place for clinical trials, reconciled environmental and pharmaceutical frameworks with dedicated support for the clean transition of production sites, and speed of decision that matches the rest of the world.

There is one more prize within reach, and Europe rarely names it. It has spent a decade watching digital leadership settle elsewhere. Health is one of the few arenas where it holds a card that is hard to copy: the depth of its health data and a public system that could make that data usable at scale under European rules. Biopharma can be the catalyst. AI-designed trials starting being accepted into the EMA regulatory process, real-world evidence generated on European populations, the European Health Data Space turned from a promise into working infrastructure. Get the governance right, and Europe speeds up the medicines of the next decade while re-entering the strategic technology race through a door that is genuinely its own.

If Europe truly wants these things, it has to own the choices they require. That means letting go of rules and reflexes built for a world that no longer exists and getting ready to compete in the one that does. It means Europe ceasing to compete with itself: more integration, not less, and Member States setting aside the fear of working together on clinical trials and health technology assessment.

It means treating national and European budgets as what they are, instruments of power and industrial leverage, rather than costs to be shaved. The old idea that solidarity and competitiveness pull in opposite directions is precisely backwards. Europe’s social model, so often cast as a weakness, is the very thing that could make its market the most stable and investable in the world. Used with confidence, solidarity is an industrial strategy.

Companies like Sanofi are not adversaries in this. We are ready to roll up our sleeves and make it work, to bring our assets and our investment to a Europe that decides it wants to build. It’s a deliberate commitment. We’ve invested more than €1.5 billion in our proprietary end-to-end mRNA platform, and a very large part of that investment is located in Europe, especially in France, also with a new lipid-nanoparticle line and Modulus, the first modular vaccines and biopharmaceuticals fully-digitalised factory in the world, capable of producing four different products simultaneously and switching quickly between them.

We see this as strengthening Europe’s scientific and industrial autonomy, as well as health and economic security. And it reflects our belief that Europe has the science, the talent and the industry to remain a global leader. The continent has every ingredient it needs to lead again. What it has to find is the nerve to use them. We believe it can. The question is whether European leaders do.