BIO Deutschland position paper: Promoting an innovative healthcare location and strengthening international competitiveness

(23.01.2024) Biotechnology is playing an increasingly important role in healthcare and is also a growing industry for Germany. As a healthcare location and as a business location for the industrial health economy, Germany is internationally competitive in research and development and manufacturing. Economic returns form the basis for future financing options for research and development, as well as for growth and employment in the country. Innovative entrepreneurs are renewing the markets with their new business ideas. As technology drivers, they ensure that innovations in the economy contribute to value creation across the board and have enormous potential for productivity growth in the German economy. And they create jobs.

The fact that Germany is at risk of losing its role as an innovation driver is exemplified by future technologies such as gene and cell therapies. The development centers for these technologies are currently mainly in the United States, China, Israel and the United Kingdom. In all these countries, networking with excellent research institutions and access to venture capital are strongly supported. Continental Europe and Germany, on the other hand, have fallen behind. In the area of clinical research, Germany is increasingly losing ground and is now ranked behind countries such as Spain, the United Kingdom and Canada. In order to leverage and sustainably establish the existing potential in Germany, it is important not only to promote early preclinical and clinical research, but also to enable the scaling necessary to reach the market. Promoting innovative local production is also an important building block for securing Germany as a location for healthcare and makes a significant contribution to tapping the potential of future therapies. It also helps to strengthen the know-how needed to manufacture novel active ingredients and to maintain expertise in local regulatory frameworks. Furthermore, it can reduce geopolitically critical dependencies on third countries and ensure the long-term security of supply of high-quality medicines.

To make the German and European healthcare sector more attractive and to strengthen supply chains at the same time, BIO Deutschland calls for:

• the creation of a more investor-friendly environment with the aim of a conducive capital and research ecosystem as well as an innovation-friendly corporate culture
• adjustment of the general framework (taxes, levies, depreciation, bureaucracy) to ensure fair international competition
• Promoting and expanding biotechnological and pharmaceutical contract manufacturing of innovative active ingredients in Europe in order to keep the relevant know-how in Germany
• Rapidly eliminating the known weaknesses of the CTIS portal and harmonizing application procedures for clinical trials even more intensively across Europe
• Consistently exploiting the possibilities of digitalization for decentralized clinical trials and creating the technical and legal conditions to use telemonitoring in a data protection-compliant manner
• Better conditions for recruiting highly qualified employees from abroad/third countries (remote/new work approaches)
• Stronger focus on future technologies such as gene and cell therapies as well as radiopharmaceuticals
• Harmonization of production approval procedures within Europe