The EU’s Biotech Industrial Policy: Between Competitiveness and Geoeconomics

This contribution examines the European Union’s emerging biotechnology industrial policy in the context of intensifying US–China technological rivalry, focusing on the relationship between competitiveness, strategic autonomy, and corporate power. The proposed EU Biotech Act seeks to strengthen the sector through regulatory simplification, public financing, strategic projects, and enhanced intellectual property protection. However, its competitiveness-oriented approach obscures the geopolitical and distributional implications of biotechnology policy. The EU’s reluctance to localise production or restrict global interdependencies is driven by the integration of European pharmaceutical multinationals into global value chains and their dependence on US markets and Chinese biotechnology ecosystem. Consequently, strategic autonomy tends to be framed as synonymous with the global profitability of pharmaceutical corporations rather than broader societal resilience. By situating the Biotech Act within debates on intellectual monopoly capitalism, this short reflection questions whether extending intellectual property rights and reducing regulatory barriers will reinforce an increasingly extractive pharmaceutical business model. It ultimately calls for reconsidering the social purpose of EU industrial policy and whether biotechnology sovereignty should prioritise corporate competitiveness or pharmaceuticals as a public good.