France finally has a full budget for 2026, ending months of stasis, and providing a degree of certainty to industry. However, especially for pharma, continual price cuts threaten the sustainability of France as an investment destination, although the reindustrialisation incentives contained with the ‘France 2030’ plan are leading to an unprecedented life sciences manufacturing boom.…

When Marc de Garidel joined AbiVax as CEO in 2023, the firm had very recently teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Now, less than three short years later, he leads the hottest prospect in European biotech, with a potentially market-leading drug for inflammatory bowel disease nearing regulatory approval. de Garidel – already with two big…

France is considered among the leading rare disease markets worldwide, both scientifically and organisationally. The country has cultivated a fully-fledged supporting ecosystem for rare conditions that is today regarded as a benchmark internationally, and which few other countries have proven able to match.   “Back in the mid-2000s, under the then Presidency of Jacques Chirac,…

France’s historical contribution to medical research is almost unparalleled globally, with 13 winners of the annual Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, and even more for Chemistry. Most famously, Louis Pasteur’s work on germ theory and pasteurisation in the 19th century laid the groundwork for much of what we know about microbiology, vaccination, and food…

France’s patient advocacy network is one of Europe’s most well-developed and formalised. Patient advocacy groups – including the three featured below – fill in research, care, and support gaps left by private industry and the state while elevating the concerns of the most important people within healthcare: patients and their caregivers.   Rare Diseases –…

France may have ceded Europe’s top spot for the sheer number of clinical trial starts to Spain in 2023, but it remains one of Europe’s most strategically valuable destinations for complex, high-science clinical research. In oncology and rare diseases clinical R&D especially, France punches well above its weight, supported by deep investigator expertise, highly specialised…

Valued fifth globally in terms of overall revenues and enjoying year-on-year growth rates exceeding five percent, the French pharma market is undeniably one of the great global life science powerhouses, playing host to virtually all top-tier, big-brand biopharma. Yet alongside its well-forged reputation for sophisticated healthcare infrastructure, manufacturing excellence, and as an epicentre of scientific…

How can mid-sized European pharmaceutical companies, which lack the scale of both Big Pharma and the major generics players, compete in a country like France? Norgine – a specialist player which turns over around EUR 600 million annually – seems to have hit upon a solution: continuous adaptation.   “What distinguishes Norgine is the organisation’s…

France and Denmark have a rich history of healthcare collaboration, from basic research to clinical trials, as well as major manufacturing investments. What links these two nations, and what are the threats to further collaborations in the coming years?   For a country with a population of just six million people, Denmark’s life sciences industry…

In recent times, French pharma industry associations have been arguing vociferously about the need to proactively ‘re-industrialise’ French pharma to counter the distortionary impact of protectionist policies and massive state subsidies in rival markets.   “France’s industrial fabric risks being systematically hollowed out if we don’t act fast to mitigate recent US and Chinese policy…