On 24 September 2024, to celebrate the start of European Biotech Week, EuropaBio brought together experts from across the biotech ecosystem and the European institutions to discuss the critical intersection of legislation and investment into innovation within the biotech industries. In the aftermath of the release of the Draghi Report and with clear political support for European leadership in biotech, including an EU Biotech Act for 2025, ensuring EU legislation becomes a key enabler of investment for innovation will be essential to the EU’s global competitiveness and strategic open autonomy.

The biotech industries are innovation intensive sectors, requiring significant investment into R&D, scale-up, manufacturing, people, and market access. Significant investments, both public and private, and a supportive legislative framework are critical to a globally competitive biotech ecosystem.

During the panel, experts underlined that the EU had grown more complex over the years. European legislation plays a key role here with a growing fragmentation across legislations, decreasing coherence and predictability while increasing burden and costs of investing into the EU. With a new European institutional cycle and a global biotech race underway, EU legislations must become enablers of global biotech leadership across value chains and sectors.