GoKawiilBioengineering can produce tools for use in cutting-edge cell therapies, among other applications.Credit: Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty
Europe is losing ground in one of the most innovation-intensive sectors in biomedicine and health care: bioengineering1. Many advances in biomedicine are technologically driven, for example, the use of artificial intelligence to predict protein structures and rapid genome sequencing for precision medicine.
Bioengineering produces technologies that aim to solve medical problems, by merging methods from mathematics, computation, engineering and biomedicine. Many countries, including the United States1, China, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, understand the power of such research. Yet, the European Union has still not caught on.
The EU’s 27 member states (EU27) host fewer than ten fully autonomous bioengineering departments, compared with more than 100 each in the United States and China. Not one EU27 university made it into the 2025 ShanghaiRanking’s top-30 list of biomedical engineering departments, compared with 18 from Asia.
Investment in medical technologies in the EU27 is low (see ‘Untapped potential’). In 2023, biotechnology companies in Europe attracted US$11.5 billion in funding, compared with about $57 billion in the United States and $21 billion China (see go.nature.com/3twrfgr and ref. 2).
Source: European Commission
Concerned about this widening gap, in March, 25 specialists from around the world — including us and our co-signatories (see Supplementary information) — came together at Europe’s life-sciences organization EMBO in Heidelberg, Germany, to find ways to address it. Here, we call on the European Council and relevant EU directorates to adopt a European bioengineering agenda that focuses on three themes.
Build academic excellence
The EU can build on its vibrant life-sciences sector, which contributes €1.5 trillion to its economy and supports 29 million jobs (see go.nature.com/4fr475p). The region has a strong culture of collaborative research, academic–industry partnerships and funding programmes that encourage the development of technologies. For decades it has excelled in other engineering disciplines, from civil to computational. And the EU’s open society, social-security systems, health-care and education infrastructures attract global talent.
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