From science to scale: Invest Europe and its members meet Commissioner Várhelyi on the European Biotech Act

Today, alongside members of the Invest Europe Biotech and Life Sciences Task Force, including Seroba, BGV and Forbion, Invest Europe met with the Commissioner for Health and Animal Welfare, Olivér Várhelyi, to discuss the European Biotech Act - announced in December 2025 and the centrepiece of the Commission’s life‑sciences agenda - and what it means in practice for Europe’s biotech and healthcare future.

Europe is exceptionally strong in science. Where it still falls short is in consistently turning that science into investable companies – companies that can grow, scale, and stay in Europe. Too often, promising innovation struggles to secure early funding, stalls at scale-up, or is commercialized elsewhere. In this context, the Biotech Act matters because it starts to address the current bottlenecks.

The Biotech Act as a competitiveness, resilience, and investability instrument

From Invest Europe’s perspective, the Act marks a meaningful shift in how Europe approaches biotech and healthcare policy. It reflects a growing recognition that these are long-term, strategic sectors – central to competitiveness, strategic autonomy and supply-chain resilience. None of these objectives can be achieved without a functioning investment pipeline.

The focus introduced on mobilizing private investment alongside public funding is, indeed, a welcome signal for the industry. The EU Health Biotechnology Investment Pilot and the BioTechEU initiative, developed together with the European Investment Bank (EIB), point in the right direction: unlocking private capital, sharing risk, and supporting companies through their full growth journey, especially where market failures persist. Channelling the capital and expertise of the many biotech and healthcare investors in Europe will ensure that promising companies do not need to relocate.

Beyond financing tools, the Act pushes to simplify and accelerate clinical trials and regulatory procedures, without lowering Europe’s high safety and quality standards. It also introduces the concept of strategic and high-impact biotech projects, prioritizing them by moving faster through permits, approvals and access to support. For investors, this kind of certainty matters. When status is transparent, predictable and clearly linked to tangible benefits, it reduces risk and directly influences investment decisions.

The Act also acknowledges that artificial intelligence and data are now core tools, from optimizing manufacturing to running smarter processes. By enabling AI testing environments and better use of health data, the Act aims to reduce uncertainty and cost across the entire development pipeline, which means more informed investment decisions.

From framework to outcomes

Ultimately, the success of the Biotech Act will not be measured by regulatory outputs alone, but by outcomes: more financeable companies, more scale-up in Europe, and more innovation reaching patients. 

If implemented consistently across Member States and aligned with broader capital markets and single market reforms, the Act can act as a bridge between public ambition and private execution, embedding risk-sharing, transparency, speed and support into the system, and connecting them to real market opportunities.

As discussions on the European Biotech Act move into the negotiation phase, Invest Europe will continue working with the Commission and co-legislators to help ensure that the Act retains the ambition of the Commission’s proposal and delivers on its potential to strengthen Europe’s biotech and healthcare ecosystem.