Scaling Europe’s biotech industry: from research excellence to industrial leadership

For the past decades, Europe has been treating biotechnology primarily as a health policy issue. That was a mistake. Biotech has become deeply geopolitical. This new reality is now more tangible than ever. Across almost every stage of the biotech lifecycle — from venture capital and clinical trials to manufacturing, commercialisation and thus access to patients — Europe is losing market share to global competitors. If the EU wants to keep up its ambitions on strategic autonomy and resilience, it will have to embrace its strengths while acknowledging its issues and act accordingly.

In that light, Europe’s biotech problem is not a lack of talent, knowledge or scientific quality. European universities, hospitals and research institutes remain among the best in the world. The paradox is that Europe excels at discovery but struggles at scale.

Too many European biotech companies still relocate abroad once they need significant growth capital. Too many promising start-ups are acquired before they become European industrial champions. Too often, Europe exports innovation while importing dependency.

The contrast with our global competitors is striking. The US has built an ecosystem where innovation can rapidly scale into global industrial leadership due to massive investments. China is aggressively integrating research, industrial policy and manufacturing capacity into one long-term strategy. Europe, meanwhile, remains fragmented — financially, regulatorily and industrially. Scientific excellence alone is no longer enough if Europe cannot transform innovation into industrial strength.

Enter: the Biotech Act I. One of the few cornerstones of the EU’s competitiveness agenda as it sits at the intersection of industrial and health policy with a growing geopolitical angle to it. This regulation goes directly to the core of who we are and should be: a deeply anchored social welfare state driven by innovation as the one of the motors for our economy and public health. Europe cannot become a continent that invents technologies for others to industrialise while risking later or no access at all for our own patients.

For too long, innovation in this field has been approached with excessive caution or even suspicion. Of course, ethical and safety standards remain essential and national budgets are scarce. But there is a difference between responsible regulation and creating an environment that systematically discourages investment and scale.

If Europe becomes known primarily for its fragmentation, complexity and regulatory uncertainty, companies and investors will simply continue to look elsewhere. We should therefore value innovation and excellence because without them, Europe would gradually lose not only competitiveness, but entire industries.

Industrial leadership cannot exist without scientific leadership, and scientific leadership cannot survive if innovation is pushed outside Europe. That means rewarding research, protecting intellectual property, accelerating approval procedures where possible and ensuring that Europe remains attractive for talent, investment and entrepreneurship.

At the same time, we should be honest: scaling Europe’s biotech industry will require much more than the Biotech Act alone. It’s only a piece of the puzzle, not the sole magic bullet. Due to fragmentation in investing and financing mechanisms, European companies often struggle to access late-stage venture capital precisely when they need to scale internationally. In the last decade, for example, 66 out of the 67 IPO’s of European companies were launched outside the EU. This is why deeper harmonisation of European capital markets is essential. Europe researches like a continent, but still finances innovation like 27 separate economies. Without significantly more venture capital and stronger capital markets integration, Europe will continue to lose promising biotech firms to the US.

Scaling also requires industrial capacity. Europe needs stronger biomanufacturing infrastructure, resilient pharmaceutical supply chains, affordable energy and access to highly skilled labour if it wants to expand its innovation capacity into broad commercialisation. If we are serious about building globally competitive biotech champions, Europe must finally think in terms of scale. 

Therefore, we need to protect without being protectionist. In an interconnected world, Europe should remain open, internationally connected and deeply engaged in global innovation networks. But openness without industrial capacity creates dependency — and dependency weakens resilience.

The Covid pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of relying excessively on external supply chains in critical sectors such as medicines and pharmaceutical ingredients. The geopolitical tensions of recent years have only reinforced that lesson. Strategic autonomy therefore means ensuring that Europe retains the capacity to research, manufacture and deliver critical health technologies itself. Not by closing itself off from the world, but by building sufficient scale and industrial strength at home. In biotech, resilience and competitiveness increasingly go hand in hand.

Europe still has lots of ingredients to succeed. The question is, however, no longer whether Europe can innovate. The question is whether those innovations will still be developed, manufactured and commercialised in Europe ten years from now.

The Biotech Act I should mark the moment Europe chooses ambition over fragmentation. Because in a sector as strategic as biotechnology, Europe cannot afford to remain merely a place where innovation starts. It must also become the place where innovation grows, scales and leads globally, for the sake of our patients and our industry.