Agenda for Day 1 - Monday 9 November, 2026Monday, 9 November 2026

Biotechnology is entering a defining period of reset.

Scientific capability has never advanced faster, yet the systems that sustain innovation are being challenged from every direction: shifting capital markets, geopolitical competition, pressure on research institutions, declining public trust, and the emergence of new platform-driven models that are redefining how biotech companies are built and scaled.

At the center of the discussion is a critical question: what will the next biotech model look like, and who will shape it?

The conversation will examine:

• Whether the traditional biotech model can still sustain breakthrough innovation

• The rise of platform-based company creation and its growing influence on global biotech

• Why long-term scientific risk is increasingly difficult to finance in short-term markets

• How AI, computation, and engineering are transforming the innovation ecosystem

• Whether Europe and the U.S. risk losing leadership as talent, capital, and innovation shift globally

• Why rebuilding trust with patients, policymakers, and society may become as important as scientific discovery itself

This is not a retrospective discussion about the state of the market. It is a strategic debate about the future architecture of the biotech industry from how innovation is funded and scaled to how leadership, trust, and competitiveness will be defined in the next era of biotechnology.

Expect a candid, provocative, and forward-looking conversation between two of the industry’s most influential thinkers as they stress test the assumptions that have defined biotech for decades and debate what comes next.

The economics of pharma’s R&D model are under increasing strain. Rising costs, timelines and competition – felt across the entire industry – are offset by the outsized successes of the few winners. This plenary takes a data-led view of pharma productivity, from developing new medicines, making them available to patients, and delivering a sustainable return on investment. Over the last five years, R&D budgets are coming under increasing pressure, which raises the importance of external innovation. This has direct implications for investment, corporate strategy, and relationships with regulators. And as AI embeds into pharma’s workflows and decision-making processes, it remains unclear how far it will shift underlying productivity. Leaders from pharma, investment, and regulation will offer their views on the current state of play and how organizations should position themselves to be among the few that consistently turn scientific progress into real patient impact.

Europe possesses world-class science, but continues to lose talent, capital, and value to more competitive ecosystems abroad. What can be done to change this?

• This panel will bring together senior investors and members of the newly created European Life Sciences Coalition (ELSC), alongside biotech CEOs, around a shared goal: to found, fund, scale and retain Europe’s next generation of Life Sciences champions

• The session will open with a brief introduction to the ELSC and its objectives, followed by a call to action inviting participants to support an Open Letter to European leaders by adding their organisation’s logo

• Panellists will explore how to strengthen European biotech as an integrated ecosystem built around innovation, company creation, and well-functioning capital markets

• Moving beyond a diagnosis of the challenges, the discussion will focus on concrete, data-driven solutions around three objectives: mobilising institutional capital into European Life Sciences; accelerating the regulatory pathway from science to patients; and building deeper, more integrated European public capital markets for growth companies

• The interactive session will examine the full investment “food chain”, from company creation and venture funding through scale-up and public markets, and the policy reforms needed to keep innovation, talent, and capital in Europe, including through the EU Biotech Act

The AI Scientist is not coming. It is already here. Systems are now capable of analysing data, generating hypotheses, and guiding experiments at a level that starts to resemble an experienced scientist, just faster, cheaper, and scalable. And this is not limited to early discovery. The same capabilities are reshaping how development decisions are made, from clinical strategy and trial design to translational evidence and regulatory planning.

The real impact is not replacement. It is multiplication.

As scientific reasoning becomes more accessible, Jevons Paradox kicks in. We do not produce fewer ideas. We produce far more. More targets, more molecules, more programmes reaching the clinic. The constraint shifts from generating options to making smarter choices about which ones to advance and how.

So what happens when biopharma moves from scarcity to abundance, across the entire value chain?

This conversation explores how that shift is already reshaping the industry. How programmes get prioritised. How development paths are designed. How capital is allocated and partnering decisions are made. And where the bottlenecks move next, into clinical capacity, execution, and infrastructure.

With perspectives from technology, pharma, and investing, this is a candid take on what is real, what is hype, and what actually matters when AI compresses both discovery and development timelines at the same time.

Because if we can build and advance far more drugs than ever before, the real question becomes: which ones are actually worth pursuing, and how fast can we prove it?