Europe already has many of the ingredients for successful biotech and pharma activity—top-tier academic research, a commitment to public research funding, a heritage of pharmaceutical giants stretching back to 1668 (when Merck was founded in Darmstadt, Germany), and a growing number of biotechs nurtured by regional biotech clusters (especially in Germany and France).
Now, the continent is about to develop a new and costly asset in hopes of expanding the biopharma industry further. On April 19, the European Commission announced plans for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), a virtual environment to store, share, and re-use data across disciplines and borders to benefit Europe’s 1.7 million researchers and 70 million science and technology professionals.
