In 2025, there was no shortage of criticism about the state of life sciences. But looking at where money, people, and infrastructure were actually committed, the picture is more solid than the narrative suggests.
Manufacturing capacity expanded, late-stage programs advanced, and regions invested with the assumption that products will need to be delivered, not just discussed.
What follows is a structured tour through the Netherlands’ main life sciences hubs, focused on where execution is happening, where scale is realistic, and where long-term decisions are already in motion. Let’s have a look at the top news in Life Science in The Netherlands 2025!
Overview Top Life Sciences News in 2026
Stop 1: Leiden Bio Science Park & Region
Stop 4: Amsterdam Science Park
Stop 5: High Tech Campus Eindhoven & Brainport
Stop 6: Novio Tech Campus, Nijmegen
Stop 7: Healthy Ageing Campus Groningen
Stop 1: Leiden Bio Science Park & Region
If you started your tour of Life Sciences Netherlands in Leiden this year, you would not need a guide to tell you this place matters. The cranes already did that for you.
Eli Lilly Moves to Leiden
In November, Eli Lilly announced a €2.6 billion investment in a new biologics manufacturing facility at Leiden Bio Science Park. Not a pilot. Not a footprint. A full-scale, long-term manufacturing bet. Construction is set to begin in 2026, with operations expected around 2030. When it comes online, the site is projected to employ roughly 500 highly skilled staff, with another 1,500 jobs tied to construction alone.
Lilly’s explanation was refreshingly unromantic. The Netherlands offers talent that can actually run complex facilities, logistics that work, and a regulatory environment that does not collapse under its own paperwork. The plant itself is designed accordingly. Automation-heavy, paperless where possible, built around modern formulation technologies like spray-dried dispersions rather than legacy production logic. This is not nostalgia manufacturing.
Source: Reuters, Invest in Holland
Expansion Kite Pharma
Leiden was not alone in drawing serious manufacturing capital. Earlier in the year, Kite Pharma, Gilead’s cell therapy arm, committed €185 million to expand its manufacturing site near Schiphol Airport. The 19,000-square-meter facility is designed to operate net-zero using solar energy and thermal storage. It will increase annual capacity to up to 4,000 cell therapies and add around 500 jobs. By 2025, the Dutch site had already produced more than 13,000 therapies for European patients, quietly disproving the idea that advanced therapies cannot be manufactured reliably at scale in Europe.
Source: Invest in Holland
What makes the region compelling is that the industrial scale now taking shape is supported by a steady pipeline of biotech companies moving into more demanding phases of development. The cranes and cleanrooms are matched by programs that are beginning to carry real clinical and regulatory expectations, not just scientific promise.
Leyden Labs
Leyden Labs raised €30 million from the European Innovation Council Fund and Invest-NL to advance its nasal-spray and mucosal immunology platform aimed at respiratory viruses. The funding reflects growing confidence in approaches that focus on broad, preventative protection rather than single-pathogen solutions, and positions the company to translate platform science into products designed for real-world deployment.
Source: Leyden Labs
Azafaros
Azafaros secured €132 million to push its rare disease therapy nizubaglustat into late-stage development. For the region, the round marked a familiar but important transition: a company moving from hypothesis and early data into the part of development where timelines harden, regulatory scrutiny increases, and execution becomes as critical as innovation.
Source: Azafaros
Alesta Therapeutics
Alesta Therapeutics raised €56 million to advance its neuromuscular disease pipeline, continuing a pattern of Leiden-based companies attracting capital for programs that address narrow, high-need indications. The focus is less on speed and more on precision, reflecting the ecosystem’s maturation toward disciplined, indication-driven development.
Source: Alesta
Taken together, these rounds were not about momentum for its own sake. They signaled companies crossing from scientific validation into the phase where ambition is tested by delivery.
VarmX
VarmX added a different kind of weight to Leiden’s year. The company, based at Leiden Bio Science Park, signed a strategic collaboration with CSL to develop VMX-C001, a therapy designed to rapidly restore coagulation in patients treated with Factor Xa inhibitors. Under the agreement, CSL will fund the global Phase 3 program and pay VarmX an upfront $117 million, with milestone payments that could reach $2.1 billion. For a focused Leiden biotech to land a deal of that scale, and at that stage, reinforced the park’s reputation as a place where narrowly defined science can translate into global relevance without detouring through larger hubs.
Source: VarmX
Pharvaris
Pharvaris also remained closely linked to Leiden in 2025, even as the company operates across Switzerland and the United States. The company raised $175 million through an upsized public offering to advance its hereditary angioedema pipeline. Its structure reflects a broader pattern among Dutch-rooted biotechs: science and early development anchored locally, capital markets and late-stage execution spread internationally.
Source: Pharvaris
Taken together, Leiden’s 2025 story is not about promise anymore. It is about follow-through. Science turning into capital expenditure. Platforms turning into pipelines. And manufacturing capacity being built by companies that expect to be here for decades, not quarters.
If this is the first stop on the tour, it sets a clear tone for the rest of the country.
Stop 2: Utrecht Science Park
Utrecht does not announce itself loudly. It does not need to. This is the part of the tour where the noise level drops and the machinery keeps running anyway.
New Plus Ultra by Kadans Science Partner
At Utrecht Science Park, the story in 2025 was not about a single headline-grabbing deal, but about steady expansion of the kind of infrastructure that serious life sciences work depends on. In October, Plus Ultra Utrecht opened its doors: a 23,000-square-meter multi-tenant building developed by Kadans, designed for companies that have moved past the PowerPoint phase and need real lab space. Flexible laboratories, shared facilities, and direct proximity to UMC Utrecht make it a place where start-ups, scale-ups, and established players can coexist without tripping over each other. Sustainability credentials came baked in, but the real selling point was density. Put enough capable people in one place and useful things tend to happen.
Source: Utrecht Science Park
GenMab Acquires Merus
Utrecht’s year also included one of the most consequential strategic moves by a company with deep local roots. Genmab announced plans to acquire Merus for approximately $8 billion, bringing Merus’ bispecific antibody petosemtamab, which holds two FDA Breakthrough Therapy designations, under Genmab’s control. The deal was less about expansion for its own sake and more about consolidation of late-stage assets, reflecting a company operating from a position of strength rather than ambition alone.
Source: GenMab
LAVA Therapeutics
LAVA Therapeutics, also based in Utrecht, featured in a year marked by portfolio reshaping. XOMA Royalty moved to acquire the company, adding LAVA’s gamma-delta bispecific antibody programs to its portfolio. For Utrecht, it reinforced the park’s role in supporting highly specialized immunotherapy platforms that attract interest not just from pharma but also from alternative capital and royalty-based models.
Source: LAVA Therapeutics
Revamp UMC Utrecht
Across the campus, UMC Utrecht laid out plans for a long-term renovation and rebuilding of its hospital complex, with construction set to begin in 2026. The vision is unapologetically ambitious: a future-proof hospital, greener public space, and a campus designed around patients, research, and care rather than cars. It is the kind of project that rarely makes biotech headlines, but without which none of the translational promises actually hold up over time.
Source: Utrecht Science Park
Laigo Bio
The region’s company pipeline continued to mature. Laigo Bio raised €11.5 million to advance its SureTAC platform, targeting membrane proteins that have historically been labelled “undruggable.” The funding round also marked a leadership transition, signalling a shift from platform validation toward pipeline execution in oncology and immunology. It was a familiar Utrecht pattern: quiet science, followed by a clear move toward development.
Source: Utrecht Science Park
Pandemic Preparedness Centre Bilthoven
A short drive away, Utrecht Science Park Bilthoven played a different but equally critical role. The campus continued to strengthen its position as a national anchor for public health and preparedness. The Pandemic Preparedness Centre remained central to ensuring vaccine manufacturing capacity for future outbreaks, while the relocation of the RIVM to Utrecht further consolidated public health expertise in the region. If Leiden is where therapies are built and scaled, Bilthoven is where the country makes sure it does not get caught flat-footed again.
Source: Utrecht Science Park
Taken together, Utrecht’s 2025 story was not flashy, and that is precisely the point. This is an ecosystem built for longevity. Translational research, public health infrastructure, and early biotech development are advancing in parallel, without pretending that any can replace the others.
A tour through Life Sciences Netherlands in Utrecht shows that progress does not always come with a ribbon-cutting. Sometimes it shows up as systems that simply keep working, year after year.
Stop 3: Pivot Park, Oss
If Leiden is about scale and Utrecht is about systems, Pivot Park is about something less glamorous and far more useful: getting things done after the science works.
Tucked into Oss, Pivot Park sits on ground with a long pharmaceutical memory. This is where Organon and MSD built decades of drug development know-how, and instead of letting that expertise fade into nostalgia, the region repurposed it. In 2025, that strategy looked increasingly intentional.
Business Hub
One of the clearest signals came with the opening of Pivot Park’s new Business Hub. Sixteen companies moved into a shared environment designed to reduce friction between small- and mid-sized pharma and biotech firms. Not an incubator theatre. Actual offices, labs, and meeting spaces for companies that already have programs to run and partners to convince. The idea is simple: if you are past discovery but not yet global, you should not be wasting time reinventing infrastructure.
Source: Pivot Park
Inotiv
That focus on execution also made Pivot Park attractive to international players looking for a European foothold. During the BIO International Convention, the campus announced a partnership with Inotiv, a U.S.-based contract research organization. Inotiv will establish a European presence at Pivot Park, plugging directly into an ecosystem that already understands regulated development work. It is the kind of move that rarely makes front-page news but matters deeply to companies navigating the long, unglamorous middle of the development pipeline.
Source: Pivot Park
What makes Pivot Park stand out on this tour is its lack of illusion. No one here pretends that innovation lives only in start-ups or universities. This is a place built around SMEs, CDMOs, service providers, and biotech companies that need experienced hands more than inspirational slogans. The campus thrives on proximity to people who have seen molecules fail, succeed, and fail again, and know what comes next.
In a year dominated elsewhere by billion-euro announcements, Pivot Park’s 2025 story was quieter but no less important. It reinforced the Netherlands’ ability to support the full lifecycle of drug development, not just the exciting beginning or the shiny end.
On the tour, Pivot Park is the stop where you are reminded that life sciences is not powered by ideas alone. It is powered by people who know how to turn those ideas into approved products without losing their sanity along the way.
Stop 4: Amsterdam Science Park
Amsterdam’s life sciences scene does not behave like a neat campus. It behaves like Amsterdam: dense, cross-wired, slightly allergic to straight lines, and somehow still productive.
Matrix Innovation Center
On the Zuidas, the Matrix Innovation Center opened at the VU campus in January. The building is set up for the kind of mixed company you actually want in one place: wet labs, dry labs, shared workspaces, and enough public space to make “collaboration” more than a word in a funding deck. There’s a restaurant, an indoor garden, and a roof terrace. Which sounds like lifestyle branding until you realize the real point is friction reduction. If people keep bumping into each other, things move faster.
Source: Deerns
Holomicrobiome Institute
Across the city at Amsterdam Science Park, the government put serious money behind a field that has been quietly reshaping health and agriculture for years. The Netherlands committed €200 million to establish the Holomicrobiome Institute, designed to study microbiomes across humans, animals, plants, and the environment. It’s interdisciplinary by design, and the ambition is wide: antimicrobial resistance, climate pressure, food security, and health. The institute is also explicitly set up to work with companies and start-ups, which is the practical part people tend to skip when they talk about “ecosystems.”
Source: Amsterdam Science Park
Amsterdam’s 2025 story, then, is not “big factory” or “single mega-round.” It’s the city doubling down on convergence: biology plus data, health plus environment, research plus commercial pull. On this tour, Amsterdam is the stop where the future is not packaged neatly, but it is definitely being built.
Stop 5: High Tech Campus Eindhoven & Brainport
At High Tech Campus Eindhoven, the mindset that they don’t sell inspiration but throughput showed up clearly in 2025 with the opening of the MedTech & BioTech Innovation Centre, a joint initiative by the campus and the Smart Biomaterials Consortium. The facility offers shared labs, workspaces, and GMP-certified cleanrooms designed for pilot production. The pitch is practical: shorten the distance between development and manufacturing, and remove the excuses that slow down commercialization. In a region where more than 350 MedTech companies already operate, and where roughly 90 percent of Dutch MedTech patents originate, this was less a moonshot than a logical next step.
Source: Brainport
The strength of Brainport lies in how comfortably biology sits next to engineering. Medical devices, biomaterials, diagnostics, and manufacturing technologies share the same ecosystem as semiconductors and systems engineering. That cross-pollination is not accidental. It is the result of decades of infrastructure built for precision, reliability, and scale, now increasingly applied to healthcare challenges that demand exactly those qualities.
TU Eindhoven €200 million investment
That long-term commitment to infrastructure was reinforced when Eindhoven University of Technology announced a €200 million investment in new laboratory and cleanroom facilities. While not life sciences–exclusive, the expansion strengthens the region’s capacity in microelectronics, materials science, and systems engineering, all of which quietly underpin much of modern MedTech and BioTech development. It is the kind of investment that rarely trends on LinkedIn, but shapes what companies will be able to build here five and ten years from now.
Source: TU Eindhoven
On this tour, Brainport Eindhoven is the stop where ambition is filtered through engineering discipline. Ideas are welcome, but only if they can survive contact with manufacturing constraints, quality systems, and real-world deployment. For life sciences companies looking to move from prototype to product without changing countries halfway through, that matters.
Stop 6: Novio Tech Campus, Nijmegen
Nijmegen does not try to be everywhere at once. It has chosen its lane and stayed in it.
Flagshipbuilding: Frontrunner
At Novio Tech Campus, the focus in 2025 was on building an environment where applied life sciences and high-tech hardware can grow side by side. Construction began on De Frontrunner, a new flagship building designed to house flexible offices and laboratories for health and semiconductor companies. Backed by the Perspectieffonds Gelderland, the project is as much about talent retention as square meters. The message is clear: if you want people to stay, give them a place where serious work can happen.
Source: Novio Tech Campus
Sencure
That focus translated quickly into company growth. Early in the year, chip-design company Sencure opened a new R&D office on the campus, expanding its footprint to support the development of medical-device microchips. By March, Sencure had raised €7.9 million to accelerate work on its SNCE800 chip for wearable health devices and to begin building a dedicated, state-of-the-art facility on site. The trajectory was textbook Nijmegen: deep technical specialization, steady capital, and a clear application in healthcare rather than consumer electronics.
Source: Sencure& More Sencure
Nijmegen’s strength lies in its restraint. The campus is not chasing every life sciences trend, but doubling down on medical devices, semiconductor-enabled health technology, and applied innovation that benefits from proximity to engineering expertise. In a national ecosystem that increasingly values focus over breadth, that clarity stood out.
On the tour, Novio Tech Campus is the stop where precision takes precedence over scale, and where the long game is played chip by chip rather than molecule by molecule.
Stop 7: Healthy Ageing Campus Groningen
Groningen is where the tour slows down and gets serious about people.
At the Healthy Ageing Campus, the focus in 2025 was not on volume or velocity, but on relevance. The campus continued to develop around a simple idea: innovation should start with how people actually age, get sick, and receive care, not just with what technology makes possible. That framing shaped both the infrastructure and the company’s activities throughout the year.
Masterplan 2040
The campus moved forward with its Masterplan 2040, outlining a long-term vision to transform the area into a green innovation district integrating healthcare, research, education, and entrepreneurship. It is a deliberately patient plan, designed to attract organizations willing to build lasting presence rather than chase short-term wins.
Source: Campus Groningen
Launch of LIFE Capital
In November 2025, the LIFE Cooperative launched LIFE Capital, a new initiative that expands beyond training to become a strategic human capital platform for the region’s Life Sciences & Health sector. The platform aims to connect talent, companies, and knowledge institutions, with a multi-year goal of attracting €50 million for human capital development. Early funding and pilot modules were already underway, with initial €6.6 million secured through regional and national sources.
Source: LIFE Cooperative
Stop 8: Brightlands
Maastricht is where the tour shifts from planning and platforms to clinical reality.
Stem cell breakthrough at Maastricht UMC+
At Brightlands Maastricht Health Campus, 2025 delivered one of the year’s most concrete medical milestones. A multidisciplinary team at Maastricht UMC+ treated a patient with a rare muscle disease using the patient’s own stem cells. It was the first time this autologous approach was applied in this indication, and it moved regenerative medicine out of conference slides and into a hospital setting. The therapy, developed under the leadership of Professor Bert Smeets and supported by a €4.5 million grant, is aimed at strengthening muscle tissue and could eventually extend to elderly and oncology patients. This was not a pilot in name only. It was treatment.
Source: Brightlands
Hy2Care raised €4.5 million
The campus also continued to show strength in medical device innovation. Hy2Care raised €4.5 million to prepare its CartRevive hydrogel implant for a U.S. clinical trial, following FDA Investigational Device Exemption status granted earlier in the year. The minimally invasive implant is designed to repair cartilage damage and delay or avoid more aggressive surgical interventions. For Brightlands, it reinforced a pattern of MedTech companies progressing through regulatory gates rather than stalling at the prototype stage.
Source: Brightlands
Qorium raised €22 million
That applied mindset carries north to Brightlands Chemelot, where life sciences overlap with industrial biotechnology and materials science. Here, progress in 2025 came through scale rather than spectacle. Qorium raised €22 million from Invest-NL, LIOF, and venture partners to scale production of cultured leather grown from animal cells. The funding supports new bioreactor systems and the development of a pilot leather factory in Maastricht, aimed at producing genuine leather without the use of livestock. It is a reminder that biotechnology’s impact increasingly extends beyond healthcare into manufacturing models and supply chains once considered untouchable.
Source: Brightlands
Thanks for reading.
This recap is not exhaustive. If it were, it would be unreadable and everyone involved would deserve compensation. A lot happens in Dutch life sciences without a press release, a photo moment, or a LinkedIn victory lap. So if something important happened and it is not in here, tell us. A deal that actually closed. A facility that is actually being built. A program that moved forward without ten adjectives attached to it. Send it in. We will add it. And if we missed you, assume it was an editorial decision, not a conspiracy.
To everyone building, regulating, financing, and delivering life sciences in the Netherlands, we wish you a focused, productive, and slightly less chaotic 2026.
