The Netherlands Is Playing a Long Game in Biotech — and It Is Starting to Show

Brexit handed the Netherlands an unexpected advantage when the European Medicines Agency relocated to Amsterdam. Since then, the country has worked to convert regulatory proximity, scientific talent, and logistics infrastructure into a long-term biotechnology growth strategy. With €1.3 billion committed to strengthening the sector and global companies increasing their investments, the Dutch ecosystem is gaining influence within Europe’s life sciences industry. The question now is whether those advantages can help close a longstanding gap between scientific innovation and commercial scale.

The Lucky Break That Became a Strategy

In 2019, Brexit handed the Netherlands a gift it had not asked for: the European Medicines Agency relocated from London to Amsterdam. The move was logistically chaotic — hundreds of EMA staff chose not to follow, creating an institutional knowledge gap that took years to stabilize — but its long-term effect on the Dutch life sciences sector has been exactly what HollandBIO’s managing director Annemiek Verkamman predicted it would be. Companies building European regulatory strategies increasingly wanted to be physically close to the agency that would evaluate their submissions. Amsterdam became the answer to a question the industry had always asked: where in Europe do you actually set up?

That question is no longer rhetorical. According to HollandBIO and Biotechgate’s 2026 Dutch Life Sciences Trend Analysis, the Netherlands now hosts 537 biotech companies, 173 medtech firms, 79 digital health companies, and more than 111 active investors within what is, by any European standard, a remarkably compact geography. Twelve universities engaged in biomedical research and eight university medical centers sit within a 120-mile radius — a density that Dutch biotech leaders compare directly to the Cambridge life sciences cluster in the UK. Schiphol is among Europe’s largest air freight hubs, and Rotterdam is Europe’s largest seaport — a physical infrastructure advantage that biologics manufacturers requiring cold-chain distribution find difficult to replicate elsewhere in the EU.

In April 2025, the Dutch government decided to stop treating these advantages as passive assets and start actively investing in them.

The €1.3 Billion Bet on 2040

The Cabinet Vision on Biotechnology 2025–2040, approved by the Council of Ministers on a proposal from Minister of Economic Affairs Dirk Beljaarts, is not a research agenda or a sector subsidy. It is a coordinated national strategy articulating a single objective: the Netherlands should be among the global leaders in biotechnology by 2040.

Nearly €1.3 billion (~$1.5 billion) in additional investment will flow through the National Growth Fund across fundamental research programs, R&D infrastructure, data platforms, and startup development — with a separate €246 million already allocated to the Biotech Booster program specifically to help early-stage companies translate scientific findings into commercial products.

The vision’s structure is notable for what it emphasizes beyond money. Rather than focusing solely on basic research, it takes a tools-first approach: investing in the infrastructure, data platforms, and research environments that enable productivity rather than simply funding discovery. It acknowledges explicitly that the Netherlands has historically excelled at generating science but struggled to commercialize it — a candor that distinguishes it from the self-congratulatory language typical of national biotech strategies elsewhere.

To address that commercialization gap, the vision proposes regulatory sandboxes — controlled testing environments referred to domestically as proeftuinen, where new biotechnological innovations can be tested under more flexible conditions than the standard approval process allows. The government is also pursuing regulatory harmonization at the EU level, advocating for coordinated frameworks across member states as a way of reducing the fragmentation that slows market entry for companies operating across multiple European jurisdictions. Removing national regulatory overreach is listed as an explicit policy priority — an unusual admission from a government that, in the view of the industry, has sometimes created more friction than it has resolved.

What Foreign Investment Reveals About the Pitch

The credibility of the Dutch strategy is measured in part by whether the global industry believes it. In November 2025, Eli Lilly announced a $3 billion manufacturing facility at the Leiden Bio Science Park in Katwijk — the largest single life sciences investment in Dutch history. The facility, construction of which is expected to begin in 2026, will produce oral solid dose medicines including orforglipron, Lilly’s oral GLP-1 receptor agonist, along with products in neuroscience, oncology, and immunology. It will employ 500 high-skilled permanent workers and approximately 1,500 construction workers during the build phase.

Lilly’s stated reasons for choosing the Netherlands are the same factors the Dutch government has been promoting: skilled talent, reliable infrastructure, proximity to European regulatory bodies, and a proven pharmaceutical manufacturing ecosystem. Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs Vincent Karremans noted that the Netherlands was selected after Lilly evaluated many locations across Europe — a competitive process the country won.

The Lilly investment follows the logic of what the Netherlands has been building for a decade. The Leiden Bio Science Park, where the new facility will be sited, is the country’s largest life sciences hub, hosting a full value chain from R&D to manufacturing, including vocational training infrastructure that supports the skilled workforce pipeline. The park is described by its director Esther Peters as distinctive precisely because it combines the entire development arc — cell and gene therapy, vaccines, advanced technology platforms — in a single connected geography, rather than separating research from manufacturing in the way that many larger national ecosystems do.

The Ecosystem Numbers: Strong Science, Concentrated Capital

The 2026 Dutch Life Sciences Trend Analysis, produced by Biotechgate in partnership with HollandBIO, offers a more nuanced picture than the headline investment figures suggest. Total life science venture funding grew from $563.9 million in 2024 to $675.9 million in 2025 — a healthy 20% increase. But biotech-specific funding edged slightly downward, mirroring broader global market conditions for the sector.

HollandBIO’s own reading of the data is candid: the total biotech funding amount in 2025 was essentially flat relative to 2024 (-2.3%), while the number of individual funding rounds decreased. The average round size is rising, but total funding is not. The industry association describes this as a “winner takes it all” dynamic that it had flagged in prior years — capital concentrating among a small group of visible winners while the broader funding ladder becomes harder for earlier-stage companies to climb.

The companies that did raise significant capital in 2025 illustrate both the ecosystem’s strengths and its concentration. Leiden-based Azafaros, focused on rare genetic lysosomal storage disorders, closed an oversubscribed $132 million Series B round — one of the largest for any Dutch biotech — to advance its Phase 3 clinical programs for conditions including GM1 and GM2 gangliosidoses and Niemann-Pick disease Type C. Leyden Labs, developing intranasal antibody programs, added approximately $100 million across private and public sources. Utrecht-based ViCentra, whose Kaleido insulin patch pump system targets the diabetes management market, expanded its Series D to $98 million in January 2026, supported by Novo Holdings, and doubled its European user base to over 4,000 patients in 2025.

The ecosystem also recorded a significant exit: Genmab acquired Merus — a Dutch clinical-stage oncology biotech whose lead asset petosemtamab targets head and neck cancer — in a transaction valued at approximately $8 billion. HollandBIO listed the acquisition among the ecosystem’s most significant recent events, alongside a note that captures the ecosystem’s central tension: some of the Netherlands’ most visible biotech companies are acquired precisely when they reach the late-stage scale that would otherwise allow them to commercialize independently. Merus is the clearest recent example, but ProQR, Frame Therapeutics, and others have followed similar paths.

The Commercialization Gap: Science Without Scale

The pattern that HollandBIO identifies — strong early-stage science, a tendency to exit or license out rather than build fully independent commercial operations — is not unique to the Netherlands, but it is structurally acute here for reasons the 2040 vision explicitly acknowledges.

Dutch biotech is often described as “dense”, and the numbers do support that framing. Nearly 2,000 life sciences companies and research organizations operate within a small geography, creating genuine proximity between academic research, early clinical development, and manufacturing capability. What the ecosystem has historically lacked is the late-stage commercial infrastructure — the sales forces, the market access capabilities, the reimbursement expertise across 27 EU national systems — that turns a Phase 3-approved drug into a sustainably commercialized product.

The licensing model that has long served as the answer to that gap — partnering with larger European or global commercial organizations to bring Dutch-developed drugs to patients — is increasingly being examined for what it costs as well as what it provides. Out-licensing to a European specialist may solve the commercial problem at launch but can create governance dependencies that constrain future strategic options, particularly as a company grows beyond the scale at which its original licensing terms were calibrated.

The 2040 vision’s emphasis on commercialization — closing the gap between scientific productivity and market presence — reflects a recognition that the licensing-first model, while pragmatically necessary, is not a long-term substitute for building the commercial capabilities that allow Dutch-origin drugs to remain Dutch-owned through their commercial lifecycle. The Biotech Booster program’s €246 million and the broader National Growth Fund allocations are aimed specifically at strengthening that transition point.

The EMA Proximity Effect: More Than a Postcode

The EMA’s presence in Amsterdam generates advantages that extend beyond the symbolic. It functions as a single entry-point for clinical trial application submissions across the European Economic Area, a logistical compression that matters enormously for companies running multinational trials. It collaborates with the FDA, PMDA, and other global regulatory agencies, meaning that a company based in Amsterdam or Leiden is building its regulatory relationships in a hub that already has working channels into the other major approval authorities.

The EMA’s arrival has drawn companies to the Netherlands for whom regulatory proximity is commercially strategic — not just startups, but established international pharma and biotech firms seeking European headquarters positions. Amgen, Takeda, Abbott, and Novartis all maintain significant operations in the Amsterdam metropolitan area. Novo Nordisk, Biogen, and Astellas have European hubs in the Netherlands. The clustering effect is self-reinforcing: companies locate near the regulatory authority, talent concentrates near the companies, and the talent pool becomes a further attraction for the next wave.

The EU’s 2026 Pharma Package — the most significant overhaul of EU pharmaceutical legislation in over two decades, with final compromise texts published in March 2026 and formal adoption expected in autumn — adds a further dimension to the Netherlands’ structural advantages. The package conditions orphan market exclusivity on genuine market presence across EU member states, introduces tiered exclusivity periods for rare disease drugs, and consolidates multi-indication orphan authorizations into a single global marketing authorization. Companies that need to engage the EMA actively and directly on these evolving terms, rather than through licensing intermediaries, have a practical incentive to establish operational presence close to the agency. The Netherlands is increasingly positioning itself as one place to do that.

Cell and Gene: The Next Frontier

One of the areas where Dutch infrastructure investment is most directly aligned with global industry direction is cell and gene therapy. The Netherlands has accumulated unusual depth in this field — in manufacturing capability, academic research, and clinical trial infrastructure — that positions it well as the modality moves from rare early approvals toward broader commercial deployment.

Advanced therapy manufacturing requires proximity to Schiphol’s freight capacity for the kind of time-sensitive, cold-chain logistics that autologous cell therapies demand. Companies working in this space describe the Netherlands as one of very few European locations where the manufacturing, logistics, and regulatory infrastructure exist together in a sufficiently integrated way to make commercial-scale cell and gene therapy production viable rather than aspirational. The vocational training programs at Leiden Bio Science Park, which produce technicians trained specifically for advanced therapy manufacturing, address a workforce bottleneck that limits expansion at comparable facilities elsewhere in Europe.

The Honest Assessment

The Netherlands’ biotech strategy is coherent, well-resourced by European standards, and backed by structural advantages — the EMA presence, the port and airport infrastructure, the dense academic-industrial cluster — that no other EU member state can fully replicate. The government’s €1.3 billion commitment signals political seriousness, and the Lilly investment signals that the global industry reads the Dutch pitch as credible.

The gaps are also visible. The “winner takes it all” capital concentration that HollandBIO documents year after year means that the ecosystem’s vitality is more thinly distributed than its aggregate funding figures suggest. The commercialization challenge — turning scientific productivity into self-sustaining commercial operations rather than late-stage exits — remains structurally unresolved, and the 2040 vision’s proposed solutions (sandboxes, regulatory reform, targeted commercialization support) are promising but unproven at scale. The number of assets in active development declined 10% in 2025, a signal that the early-stage pipeline feeding the later stages needs attention.

What the Netherlands has built, against a competitive European backdrop, is a platform that attracts global capital, retains academic talent, and provides the regulatory and logistical infrastructure that rare disease, oncology, and advanced therapy developers increasingly require close at hand. The question its industry association is asking — whether “biotech is on the map but still looking for a way up” — is the right one. The map part is settled. The way up is the work of the next decade.

Author

Bernice Lottering

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