Swiss Nordic Bio, held at Zürich Airport, brings Swiss, Austrian and Nordic biotech and medtech companies together with investors and partners for one condensed day of keynotes, company pitches and pre-booked matchmaking meetings. It carries 20 years of tradition, previously as the Swiss Scandinavian Bio-Business Seminar. The companies BioStock spoke to came for different reasons, but most framed the day around the same two priorities: capital and relationships.
What drew them to Zurich
For several of the companies, the day is first of all about investors. Circio, listed and based in Oslo, wants to broaden its shareholder base, says CEO Erik Digman Wiklund.
– Circio’s aim is to strengthen our cap table with international specialist and institutional investors. Swiss Nordic Bio is an excellent forum to connect with relevant fund managers, advisors and industry professionals, and to market Circio to a broad European audience, he says.
For Gothenburg-based Serial X, the context is a capital raise. The company is raising money to scale its room-temperature crystallography technology and expand into pharmaceutical drug discovery, and CEO Yanyan Chen points to Switzerland’s life science ecosystem and its history in crystallography as the reason for the visit. A good trip, she says, would mean starting a few high-quality relationships that turn into investment, commercial partnerships or new market opportunities.
Also from Gothenburg, Mentice came to meet investors and promote the company to potential new ones. CEO Frans Venker frames it as a Swedish success story worth telling: a small operation that has become a long-term partner to the large medical device industry.
– Mentice is a success story for Sweden, says Venker.
Cinclus Pharma arrives at a specific moment. The Stockholm company expects topline results from its first phase III study of linaprazan glurate in the fourth quarter, and CEO Christer Ahlberg frames the event around that progress.
– Swiss Nordic Bio is an opportunity to discuss that progress with international investors and potential partners who understand both the clinical need and the commercial opportunity, he says.
Photocure, also listed and based in Oslo, describes the day as a meeting point.
– For Photocure, the value of Swiss Nordic Bio is really the intersection of capital and strategic relationships, says President and CEO Dan Schneider.
Schneider says the company is looking for investors who can read the combination of a revenue-generating Hexvix/Cysview franchise, room to grow penetration, and new growth coming through what Photocure wants to build into a broader uro-oncology platform.
Not everyone leads with capital. For Sprint Bioscience in Stockholm, the day is about relationships and staying visible, says CEO Johan Emilsson.
– In biotech, value is created over time, and that means staying connected with both existing and new contacts, he says. If I return home having had a number of meaningful conversations and strengthened our network, it will have been time well spent.
Genetic Analysis, based in Oslo, came mainly for partnering. CEO Ronny Hermansen says he is focusing on networking and talking to pharma companies about the company’s IBD precision diagnostics and how they could help stratify patients and improve treatment, while staying open to new investors.
Neurometa Therapeutics, from Lund, is further along a specific track: the company is in due diligence with a group of investors and is using the day to meet others who could join the syndicate. CEO Preben Bruun-Nyzell also likes the setup.
– One condensed, very busy day, and a conference that’s not too large, which makes networking much easier, he says.
A higher bar for international capital
One of the day’s keynotes, by Bita Sehat of Trill Impact, carried the title The new rules of building investable biotech in Europe. BioStock put the underlying question to the companies directly: what does it take for a Nordic company to become investable to international capital today? The responses returned to the same starting point. The science has to be there, but it no longer sells the company on its own.
– Strong science alone is no longer enough, says Serial X’s Yanyan Chen. International investors want to see a real customer problem, differentiated technology, commercial validation and a credible path to international scale, she says. For Nordic deep-tech, the task is to translate the science into a simple business case: who needs the technology, why they will pay for it, and how the company builds something scalable and defensible, carried by a team that can make that shift.
At Photocure, Dan Schneider dates the change.
– Five years ago, being differentiated and having good science could get you on the radar. Today, investors want evidence that you can convert that science into a scalable business, he says.
He breaks it into three things a Nordic company needs: proof that the product works and customers will pay for it, a market large enough to matter to international investors, and a next chapter that can create more value than doing more of the same. Photocure, he says, is using its Hexvix/Cysview foundation to build toward that broader uro-oncology diagnostic platform, and the job now is to make the progression clear to investors meeting the company for the first time.
Johan Emilsson lands in the same place from Sprint Bioscience: strong science, clear differentiation and a credible path to value creation, backed by a realistic development strategy and a clear read of the commercial opportunity. Christer Ahlberg frames it through Cinclus: a compelling product that meets a clear unmet medical need and a substantial commercial opportunity, supported by credible clinical data and a path to market. He sees that in linaprazan glurate, aimed at severe erosive GERD, where, according to the company, many patients are inadequately treated today. Cinclus describes the candidate’s potential as blockbuster.
For listed companies, Circio’s Erik Digman Wiklund adds a point that is easy to overlook.
– As a listed company, trading liquidity is a critical, and often overlooked, aspect to attract institutional investors looking for larger tickets, he says.
Biotechs on smaller exchanges, he argues, have to build a large shareholder base through steady newsflow and communication that keeps them relevant and stimulates market interest.
Genetic Analysis’s Ronny Hermansen points to ambition. A biotech should think global from day one, he says.
– The Nordics already have strong science, but what’s often missing is commercial focus and international ambition, says Hermansen, who wants management teams and boards that bring international experience in commercialisation, financing and development.
Mentice’s Frans Venker pushes the same point harder. A Nordic company has to become truly global in how it works and in the technologies it adopts, he says. The region is a strong ecosystem, with access to affordable talent and expertise and a stable setting where the government backs investment, but the world is bigger, and competing in it is partly a matter of work culture.
– Operating globally also means working after 5pm and not closing during the summer for at least six weeks. Global companies operate around the clock, he says.
Capital is running on fumes
Preben Bruun-Nyzell turns the question around. The problem, as Neurometa’s CEO sees it, is not the quality of the companies but the money behind them.
– Europe has many companies with excellent science and strong teams that should be investable, but the ecosystem is severely short of capital, he says.
He does see one encouraging shift: pharma companies are engaging earlier, many now willing to talk at development candidate stage rather than waiting for clinical data. The catch is that too few companies reach it.
– Too many have been funded with too little capital and are now running on fumes, he says.
It is the same gap that Trill Impact’s Bita Sehat had pointed to from the stage: Europe produces excellent science but has struggled to turn it into companies that scale globally.
