When a groundbreaking cancer drug is approved, chances are it will appear in New York or Boston long before Berlin or Paris. Today, 85% of new medicines launch in the U.S. first, while Europe claims barely 15%. That’s a dramatic reversal of fortune for a continent that once led the pharmaceutical world.
The reasons lie not in science, but in policy. In the 1980s, Washington passed the Bayh-Dole Act, letting universities and publicly funded researchers patent and license their discoveries. That single step turned academic labs into engines of entrepreneurship, spawning companies like Genentech and Moderna. Venture capital followed, creating biotech clusters from Silicon Valley to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Europe, meanwhile, tied itself in regulatory knots. Fragmented national systems, price caps, and slow approval processes discouraged investors. A German lab that invents a promising therapy may see it commercialised in California instead, where the financial and legal ecosystem rewards speed and risk.
For the Adria region, where biotech is still emerging, the message is blunt: innovation doesn’t thrive on talent alone—it needs rules that reward risk-taking. Without reforms, Europe’s role as a global player in biopharma may shrink to that of a consumer, not a creator, of the next medical breakthroughs.
