Newsletter Signup - Under Article / In Page
"*" indicates required fields
The Nordic Life Science (NLS) Days took place this week, October 13–14, in Gothenburg, Sweden. Labiotech was on site to take the pulse of the Nordic biotech scene, and, more specifically, of Sweden’s growing role within it.
Within Sweden, Gothenburg isn’t usually the first place people think of when they picture biotech, yet a closer look reveals a city quietly becoming one of the country’s most dynamic life science hubs. You could even argue that much of what’s happening here simply doesn’t exist anywhere else.
While Stockholm still dominates Sweden’s public image, Gothenburg’s life science ecosystem is expanding fast, driven by a unique mix of academia, hospitals, and industry, and a rare ability to connect the full supply chain in one place. That proximity speeds up collaboration and decision-making in a way that’s hard to replicate.
Big Pharma’s presence has also played a decisive role. About fifteen years ago, AstraZeneca launched the BioVentureHub with support from the Swedish government, an open-innovation experiment that has since evolved into a full innovation district. The hub’s CEO, Magnus Björsne, said the Nordics were the only place where this vision for the hub was able to come to life.
So, what makes Sweden, and Gothenburg in particular, such fertile ground for biotech innovation? And why is it still so often overlooked on the global map?
Table of contents
Setting the scene, Sweden’s biotech
Sweden’s pipeline is big and early-stage-heavy. The latest SwedenBIO mapping counts 518 projects across 152 Swedish-headquartered companies, with roughly half in discovery and preclinical and half currently in the clinic. That breadth is unusual for a country of 10 million and, according to SwedenBIO, the preclinical side now exceeds the preclinical portfolios of some big pharmas, with 181 preclinical programs in Sweden versus 80 for Eli Lilly, the company with the most programs that haven’t reached the clinic yet. This is evidence of strong upstream science that still needs scale-up capital downstream. However, programs around phase 3 are rarer, with only 10, whereas companies such as AstraZeneca or Pfizer have around 30 phase 3 programs.
Therapeutically, Sweden’s portfolio has traditionally been led by oncology and neurology and central nervous system (CNS) programs, with endocrinology/metabolism and infectious disease also prominent, a mix that’s now delivered more than 200 assets “available for partnering” in the newest edition of the Swedish Drug Discovery and Development Pipeline report. Modalities span small molecules and biologics, with cell and gene therapies gaining an expanding share. During the opening session of the NLS Days 2025, Daniel Chancelor, vice president of Norstella, pointed out that 84% of the active programs in the Nordics have been discovered on land, where you would typically observe a variable between 69 to 76% in other regions of the world, showing that discovery is a strong suit for the Nordics.
What makes the Swedish model distinctive is how research plugs into care. National personal identity numbers enable longitudinal linkage across registries and biobanks, and registry-based randomized clinical trials are a normalized design, embedding randomization and follow-up in routine care to cut costs and time. However, Boubou Hallberg, Sahlgrenska University Hospital director, pointed out that there were still some struggles in the clinical trial recruitment process. While this isn’t a challenge unique to Sweden, he recognized that there were currently some discussions about integrating further clinical trial recruitment into the hospital’s processes.
Geographically, Stockholm/Uppsala remains Sweden’s largest life-science hub by scale, while Gothenburg is gaining attention for its density around AstraZeneca’s campus, now extended into GoCo Health Innovation City and, most recently, reinforced by Thermo Fisher’s incoming bioanalytical lab. That cluster logic is why many observers say Gothenburg now compresses the “full supply chain” into a walkable radius.
The BioVentureHub in Gothenburg and the AstraZeneca effect
AstraZeneca’s BioVentureHub began in 2014 as an experiment: open parts of a big-pharma R&D campus to external startups and academic groups and let day-to-day proximity do the rest. Embedded inside AstraZeneca’s Gothenburg site, the hub offers residents access to expertise, infrastructure, and labs: an “open innovation” setup that was unusual in pharma at the time but aligned with Sweden’s collaboration culture.
“What made it possible in the first place, I think, is the trust we got from the senior management of AstraZeneca; we didn’t have any key performance indicators (KPIs) in the first five years, which is quite unusual,” said Björsne. But having the green light from AstraZeneca’s management team was only the first step; convincing the Swedish government to be on board proved more difficult.
In Europe, public–private collaborations usually follow government calls for proposals. The BioVentureHub didn’t fit that template. “There were a million reasons to say no,” Björsne recalled. “The first answer we got from the Swedish Innovation Agency was that the project was too innovative. I told them it was a shame that an innovation agency would say that, and they might not have liked that, so they became very accommodating in trying to make the project fit. Sweden is usually very cautious, but in this particular case, the government was very brave.”
The thinking was straightforward: AstraZeneca’s scientists are world-class, but the smartest advances happen when you bring more minds inside the walls. As Björsne has put it, the more we bring in from outside, the more successful we’ll be.
Björsne said the idea was to build a true ecosystem, not just a cluster, which he thinks have plenty of in the industry, but are often mistaken for an ecosystem. “Our portfolio strategy within the hub we set up 12 years ago and hasn’t changed since, is to blend five different industry verticals: traditional biotech, medtech, deeptech, digital science, and sustained tech.”
The other component is that the hub’s portfolio relies on non-competitive synergies. The BioVentureHub is not going to host potential AstraZeneca competitors, nor is it going to host companies competing against each other. The other side is that the companies typically hosted by the hub are at the scale-up phase and have their intellectual property (IP) in place, so it encourages openness within the hub.
It’s also interesting to see how academia got injected into the hub. Björsne noted that usually industry approaches academia with a problem to solve, and it turns into a transactional relationship very soon. The objective here is to give access to AstraZeneca’s resources and assets for academia to drive basic research jointly with AstraZeneca.
The management of the BioVentureHub describes it as a “no strings attached system” where AstraZeneca has no right over the companies in the hub, not even a first-to-negotiate right. However, it would be naïve to think there’s nothing for Astrazeneca there. Björsne said that, quite often, when a company with potential is identified, the industry will wait for it to mature before collaborating, and sometimes it is too late because you might end up in a situation where you think, “if only they had thought about that, they would have been the perfect partner.” And 40% of the time, AstraZeneca does end up partnering with the companies of the hub, so it’s likely their development was influenced by their presence in the hub: a win-win situation, but with no strings attached.
Over the past decade, that “inside-the-campus” idea has scaled beyond the gates into a full district: GoCo Health Innovation City, next door, a purpose-built neighborhood for labs, offices, and clinics intended to host hundreds of organizations. Companies have been moving in steadily: Fujirebio Diagnostics built a new 8,000 square meter facility; Mölnlycke relocated its headquarters; and new anchors are arriving.
One of the most notable new arrivals is Thermo Fisher, establishing a bioanalytical laboratory at GoCo that’s slated to add up to 140 jobs as it comes online (construction completion in the fourth quarter of 2025, and operations from 2026). That’s tangible capacity, GLP bioanalysis, plugging directly into the local pipeline.
Crucially, the hub has also started pulling in non-traditional players whose work sits at the edge of life sciences. In late 2024, IonQ, a U.S. quantum-computing company, joined the BioVentureHub and established a Quantum Computational Chemistry Center of Excellence inside AstraZeneca’s Gothenburg campus, explicitly to co-develop quantum-enabled discovery workflows with AstraZeneca scientists. It’s a live example of Sweden’s sector-convergence.
The ATMP/regenerative medicine build-out is happening in parallel: CCRM Nordics, a national commercialization cluster for advanced therapies, has chosen GoCo for its GMP and process-development facilities, reinforcing Gothenburg’s role as a place where research, manufacturing, and clinical partners sit within a few tram stops of each other.
Indeed, Lorenzo Roversi, managing director of IonQ U.K. and Nordics, explained that one of the reasons why the company decided to set up operations in Gothenburg is that he can meet the entire chain in a day, making the decision process so much faster than anywhere else in the world.
Taken together, this is the AstraZeneca effect: a big-pharma site that didn’t just retain R&D in Sweden, but opened up, catalyzed a neighborhood, and began attracting both specialist diagnostics and global service capacity as well as deep-tech newcomers into the same footprint. In practice, it means founders, clinicians, and platform companies share physical space, and the translational loop tightens.
Sweden’s biotech bottleneck: the funding gap
For all its collaborative strengths, Sweden’s biotech ecosystem faces one persistent constraint: capital. The country produces a striking volume of early-stage innovation, but many of its most promising programs never make it to later clinical phases.
That cliff typically appears after series A. Early support is strong: seed grants from Vinnova, soft loans from Almi, and national venture funds like Industrifonden are active. But once projects reach the expensive stages of clinical validation, domestic capital tends to dry up. “I have rarely seen that much R&D in a 5-kilometer radius; companies just lack the capital,” said Roversi. According to him, Sweden is one of the most financially educated countries in Europe, but there is still a mismatch between the R&D and the money poured into the industry. “There is a lack of knowledge on the inflection points needed to scale a company. That results in a scattered investment landscape.”
Many young Swedish biotechs bridge the gap by turning to foreign syndicates, U.S. or U.K. crossover investors, or by listing early on Nasdaq First North, the junior market that has historically been a launchpad for small biopharma. During the boom years, this early listing model provided liquidity and visibility. But since the 2022 downturn, follow-on financing has become far harder to secure, leaving many micro-cap biotechs underfunded mid-trial.
The consequences are visible across the pipeline. Without strong late-stage funding, companies either slow their programs, partner earlier than they’d like, or see control shift abroad once international investors come on board. It’s a dynamic that SwedenBIO has warned about repeatedly: when late money is foreign, so are the boards, the trials, and eventually the value capture.
The problem isn’t a lack of venture capital per se, but a mismatch in ticket size and risk appetite. Swedish and Nordic investors can comfortably fund €5 to 15 million series A rounds, but not the €50 to 150 million series B or C that a pivotal trial demands. That makes it difficult to build domestic champions comparable to those in the U.S.
Ultimately, Sweden’s challenge in biotech isn’t creating science, it’s scaling it. The same collaborative spirit that built BioVentureHub and GoCo could, with the right financial architecture, sustain companies through the long, costly journey to commercialization. Until that happens, Sweden will remain one of Europe’s most inventive biotech ecosystems.
Partnering 2030: The Biotech Perspective 2023
