BIO-RED Thematic Lab: Identify and Solve the Barriers for Biotech Startups

Biotech startups often face the same barriers: limited access to facilities, scale-up challenges and limited partnerships. These barriers slow development and make it harder to become investment-ready.

At the online BIO-RED Thematic Lab, you will meet key ecosystem actors to jointly identify the most critical challenges and turn them into concrete opportunities.

Through expert talks, interactive sessions and targeted matchmaking, you will gain insight into where things typically go wrong — and what it takes to solve them.

Together with the other participants, you will explore themes such as access to facilities, access to know-how and new partnership models.

This event will be in English.

What you will gain by participating

• A clearer view of key barriers for biotech startups
• Fresh perspectives from key ecosystem actors
• A chance to shape future solutions and collaborations
• Relevant new contacts through facilitated matchmaking

Bring your experience into the conversation and help shape stronger support for the next generation of biotech projects in Europe.

Program

Welcome and BIO-RED context

The Danish thematic lab focuses on facilities, scale-up, regulatory readiness and partnerships for early-stage biotech and medtech startups. The aim is to identify at least two concrete cases to take forward into the BIO-RED hackathon process.

Susanne Trillingsgaard Venø / Senior Project Manager, Danish Life Science Cluster

Keynote: Start with the end in mind – early decisions affecting later-stage scale-up and production

Early-stage biotech companies often focus on proving that the science works. But early choices can have major consequences when quality, scale-up, production and regulatory requirements increase.

This talk shows why startups should consider quality, development, scale-up and production from the start – and how it can prevent delays, errors and costly rework.

Speaker: Bjørn Voldborg, Senior Advisor, Bioneer and DTU Shared Facilities

A national mapping of Danish test, demonstration, and development facilities

A national study has mapped access to infrastructure that supports innovation, scale-up and commercialization. The mapping focuses on Denmark, but the platform is open to other European countries.

Speaker: Lars Nils Fremerey, Senior Consultant, Danish Technological Institute

Startup scaling in practice: from spinout to structured company

PentaBase has grown over 20+ years from a service-based spinout into a professionalized company with structured processes and experience from rapid growth, including development of a COVID-19 test. PentaBase now works with startups through a co-creation model that strengthens technical work, processes, formal requirements and regulatory awareness from the start.

Speaker: Ida Torp Andersen, COO, PentaBase

Medtech regulatory: getting requirements right from the beginning

As medtech regulatory consultants, these speakers are often brought in late, when documentation, requirements and structures must be cleaned up or rebuilt. They have therefore developed software that helps companies work systematically with requirements from the start.

The talk shares practical dos and don’ts and shows how standardized requirements can reduce later rework.

Speakers: Maria Lund Jensen & Miles Barnaby Gerrard, founders, Processive Projects

Short transition: from inputs to challenges and breakout discussions

Participants identify concrete bottlenecks and turn them into challenge statements for the BIO-RED hackathon process.

Matchmaking

Short 1:1 or small-group matchmaking. The aim is to connect startups, service providers, facilities, advisors and ecosystem actors around concrete needs and possible collaborations.

Wrap-up and thank you for joining

About BIO-RED

BIO-RED is an EU-funded collaboration between seven European regions working to strengthen life science innovation through collaboration across companies, research environments and investors. The project partners have carried out a broad mapping of the ecosystem, which forms the basis for analysing strengths and weaknesses in biotech — both overall and across EU regions.

Funded by the European Union.