Ashley Noriega / Jan 2026
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Policymakers love moonshots: bold, galvanising bets. In an era of sluggish growth, democratic disillusionment, and overlapping crises, rallying around an ambitious collective effort can bring focus and unity. A thriving European biotech industry, built on talent, scientific excellence, and investment, could be exactly that kind of mission.
Economies reach for the tools they know, and the EU knows regulation. But this Act must start with vision, not process. What capabilities does Europe want? Which markets need to thrive? What leadership should drive them? The Act must drive Europe to answer these questions, without burying them under scaffolding.
This could be Europe's most significant industrial policy intervention since the Chips Act. But if we are serious about building biotech into a strategic pillar that delivers jobs, growth, and solutions for future generations, we need to be clear about what we're aiming for. The Act must deliver a biotech ecosystem that can compete globally and drive European resilience—one where a minor product variation does not reopen the entire regulatory process, and where companies can scale without relocating. We need to move beyond the process for discussing how to do this.
Europe needs to move faster and more coherently, or it will keep losing ground. The Commission understands this, and it is why we have a Biotech Act at all. The question is what speed and coherence look like in practice. Consider two areas the Biotech Act must get right to align fully with Europe’s ambitions: biosecurity and the integration of biotechnology innovations into civil-military supply chains. On biosecurity, the UK ‘s 2018 strategy was judged as lacking clear accountability. The 2023 replacement assigned clear responsibilities at senior level, matched resources to mandates, and set measurable outcomes. On defence integration, the US’s draft National Defense Authorization Act is looking to set new benchmarks - requiring the Department of Defense to produce a roadmap for adopting biotechnology across military supply chains within twelve months, mandating public guidance on how companies can demonstrate that biobased products meet defence requirements and an intelligence strategy to assess adversaries' biotechnology capabilities and supply chain vulnerabilities. Clear timelines, accountability and alignment to a vision.
The complexities of the EU landscape make mission-oriented policy challenging, but not impossible. If the Biotech Act succeeds in establishing an EU investment facility that bridges the scale-up funding gap, the ability to accelerate strategic cross-border projects, and procurement rules that favour Union-based suppliers, it will have done something genuinely significant. But architecture matters. If the governance model reverts to familiar patterns, with layers of advisory committees, consensus-based decision-making, tasks distributed across multiple bodies, and key details deferred to implementing acts of uncertain timing, then the Act will be optimised for process rather than speed and effectiveness. Our competitors are not convening working groups, they’re assigning named officials to deliver specific, time-bound outcomes. The Biotech Act must support EU Member States to do the same.
Europe will also need to decide whether it is building capabilities or funding projects, and whether it is regulating platforms or individual products.If Europe is serious about biotech as a strategic economic and resilience pillar, it needs domestic biomanufacturing at scale, sampling and detection infrastructure that can identify novel and engineered pathogens before they spread, and compute capacity that enables the next generation of discovery. These cannot be treated as time-limited initiatives. They are permanent, strategic capabilities.
In twenty years, no one will remember every twist and turn in the Brussels decision-making process for the EU Biotech Act . They will remember whether Europe built a biotech industry that could deliver in a crisis and thrive in peace. Policymakers want a moonshot. But moonshots have launch windows. The next industrial era will be biological, and the window for Europe to lead it is narrowing.
