Marc van Voorst: Strategic autonomy starts with a strong domestic market

December 10, 2025

^{This column was originally written in Dutch. This is an English translation.}

In an increasingly deglobalised world, “strategic autonomy” is the new buzzword in Brussels. Europe wants to be less dependent on superpowers such as the United States and China in crucial areas such as energy, defence, microchips and medicines. In each of these areas, considerable efforts are being made to strengthen the EU's competitive position.

By Marc van Voorst, Head of Public Affairs at Forbion

The EU Biotech Act was created to accelerate innovation, development, production and market access for biotech products within the EU. This Act recognises a number of major challenges. The complex and fragmented regulatory framework – consisting of EU laws, national implementations and sector-specific rules – requires greater harmonisation. In addition, the financing of capital-intensive processes is an obstacle, requiring sufficient resources for each phase of business growth, from start-up to scale-up. It is therefore important that institutional investors such as pension funds, banks and insurers invest more in biotech and life sciences. Public funds must also be made available to strengthen market players and must be used in a smarter, more targeted and more flexible way to address market failures. Innovations and new genetic techniques must also be safe, sustainable and ethically responsible. Finally, the availability of sufficient well-trained talent is essential for the sector to grow.

Although these obstacles deserve attention, the key to a successful biotech hub lies elsewhere: in creating an attractive domestic market. Innovation in biotech is time-consuming and costly. Projects lasting ten years and costing hundreds of millions of euros are the rule rather than the exception.

Those investments must be recouped. And that is currently happening mainly in the United States. Why? Because pharmaceutical and biotech products are more expensive in the US than in Europe. This means that in many cases, companies first market their innovations there. De facto, the American end user is therefore financing a large part of global biotech innovation. As with defence (NATO), Europe is also dependent on the US in this area.

This is a point of attention for Donald Trump, who advocates “reference pricing”: the US should not pay more than the average of a number of Western countries. As a result, some pharmaceutical companies are considering not launching products in those countries at all, in order to protect their pricing in the US. This makes early investments more risky and can slow down innovation.

If the EU really wants strategic autonomy in the field of life sciences and biotech, the obstacles in the Biotech Act must be addressed. But it is at least as important to create a stronger European market. An additional advantage of a thriving life sciences ecosystem is the tax revenue that flows to Europe when medicines are sold worldwide. As with the discussion on the financing of our security and defence, the parties forming the coalition government must also discuss where and by whom innovation in biotech is paid for. The coalition talks have a clear task here: to ensure that the Netherlands focuses not only on strategic autonomy in defence and energy, but also on a future-proof biotech sector. This requires a clear long-term vision on innovation policy and more capital.