We caught up with Biopôle CEO Nasri Nahas about 2025, including the challenges and opportunities the past year offered to Biopôle SA and its members

How was 2025 for Biopôle SA?

For us, it was a year of moving sands. We’re not sitting in an ivory tower here – we exist in the context of the market and are affected by geopolitical uncertainty, financial constraints and technical challenges. Clearly, the pace of change in AI was rapid last year. Of course, it brings new possibilities, but it also changes the playing field for the industry.

It’s also got tougher for entrepreneurs to access funding. Our members need more help to find investors and partners, and secure non-dilutive funds rather than venture capital. They are also struggling to attract the right talent, especially senior executives, either because they don’t have the means to pay them or because they’re just not available.

Biopôle SA’s mission from day one has been to serve our members. In this way, these challenges become opportunities. When our entrepreneurs are experiencing turbulence, it’s our job to anticipate their needs and create somewhere they can feel at ease.

The spaces and programmes we offer, the bridges we create between academia and industry, the investment support we provide – every year we’re pushed to rediscover ourselves and hone our solutions to better serve our members. 2025 was no exception.

The new BIP was a major milestone. What motivated its redesign? And how does it reflect Biopôle’s broader philosophy on nurturing innovation?

When looking for investment, young companies tend to go too early, before they are ready – when it’s clear they need a lot more than just financial support. The BIP is the natural evolution of the Biopôle Start-up Fund. We found that the old model of giving out CHF 90,000 three times wasn’t serving our members well enough; bootstrapping is not a solution. Now, participants in the BIP receive CHF 90,000 once, but then we help them get ready for investment: train them, support them with networking, put them in front of investors every quarter, work with them on their data room. Then, and only if they’re ready, there’s an opportunity to receive a further CHF 250,000 via the Pre-Clinical Top-Up, which must be matched by CHF 250,000 sourced by the company itself. It’s much more systematic and we’ve received very positive feedback so far.

Fostering innovation is a key part of our mission, but it has to serve a purpose. The BIP is about developing products that someone’s willing to write a cheque for – and not just your mother! Biopôle is here to help people to test their ideas and nail them down, evolving them into something that can ultimately be sold and benefit an end user. That’s what drives everything we do.

Following StartLab and Superlab, Biopôle delivered new ‘private’ laboratories this year at MyLab. Why have you chosen to invest in private lab space again?

When young adults leave home, they’re stepping out into the world, but they still need their parents in all sorts of ways. Similarly, when our members leave StartLab or Superlab, they require help to move towards the kind of full independence that investors are looking for. That’s where we come in: we designed MyLab to allow our members to spread their wings, but with our continued support.

The concept is not especially new, but what’s unusual is the range of different options for private labs and shared infrastructure we offer here. It allows for natural progression and removes one of the key hurdles for biotech companies. Look at Distalmotion, HAYA Therapeutics, Volumina Medical, Atinary Technologies – all these companies joined us at StartLab with one or two benches and now they each occupy a couple of hundred square metres here. MyLab could help even more members embark on this journey.

New companies in 2025 meant new talents on campus – the number of people on campus grew from 2,500 at the end of 2024 to 3,500 at the end of 2025. What are the implications?

This year, Aurigen, Unisanté and the SDSC all joined the campus – and their arrival represents an opportunity for our community. They haven’t chosen Biopôle just for the lake view! The major draw is our hub of talented people, companies and organisations that collaborate here on a daily basis. We’re looking forward to actively collaborating with them.

And, of course, the challenge for Biopôle SA is keeping up with the number of people on site! We now have 180 companies on campus. We need to maintain our close relationships with our members so that we can continue to identify opportunities for them and connect the dots – but this is a beautiful problem to have.

This year, Biopôle brought new energy to talent development. What prompted this focus and how does it align with your mission?

We have strong links with academia – several University of Lausanne (UNIL) departments are even situated on our campus – so it feels natural for us to create bridges between our companies and the academic institutions on site. This is true for research collaboration projects, but also for employment opportunities. In particular, PhD students and postdoc researchers are an incredible asset for industry players, given their strong focus on R&D. This year, we took action to better connect these two worlds.

Our Biopôle Discovery Day in March is now a firm fixture in the calendar, offering students and academics a chance to meet with entrepreneurs and learn more about the industry. Meanwhile, our Postgrad Consulting Programme offers talented young scientists hands-on opportunities to work with life sciences companies that are looking for fresh perspectives and innovative solutions. In addition, we launched Voices of Life Sciences: A Biopôle Podcast and a regular career newsletter, so people can learn about what it means to work in the life sciences – the difficulties as well as the benefits!

Biopôle continued to make progress on environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments this year. How do you balance sustainability ambitions with operational realities?

One of the main challenges with ESG is helping our entrepreneurs understand that it’s not the enemy of growth: being sustainable is not at odds with breaking even or having a sound return on investment. This is something that needs to be anchored in people’s minds from the beginning.

We’ve been focusing on responsible entrepreneurship, where we consider the full meaning of ESG, looking beyond carbon emissions and impact on nature, beyond box-ticking exercises. When we consider capital, we often think only about pure monetary return on investment; it’s easy to overlook returns on environmental capital, social capital, people capital. But people should be integrating real sustainability, considering all these forms of capital, into their business model and their accounts.

At Biopôle, we have an opportunity to train young entrepreneurs in newer business models that consider the wider impact of their work. We’re currently identifying partners we can work with on this project. And we’re confident we’ll find funding – there are more and more ethical investors who will only invest in this kind of enterprise. It may take years for it to come to fruition – perhaps something I’ll be able to witness in time for my retirement – but I feel strongly that we must start paving the way for this new mode of thinking about the purpose and responsibilities of business.

What does the future look like? What do you want to focus on in the next couple of years?

Biopôle is growing. We now number 3,500 people over 13 buildings, spread across the north and south of the campus. To keep it vibrant, we need to help new members to integrate with the existing ones, making sure we remain a community and not just a collection of companies. We don’t want people to feel like they’re in the middle of nowhere. Biopôle is somewhere – somewhere worth cultivating and we will fight to do that.

We also plan to keep up with technological innovation, to be aware of what’s coming onto the market and anticipate our members’ needs around this. There’s no flagship digital tool for the life sciences – no equivalent of a large language model that can solve the problems people are facing – but over the next year we’ll be focusing on what is available and how it might benefit our community.

And, of course, in the coming years we must decide how Biopôle will grow when there are no more buildings to construct. At some point, there will be no more new spaces on the existing campus. What will be our next focus, after the cranes and diggers have rolled away? How will we then manage, support and grow the community? I don’t have all the answers to that yet, but I look forward to finding out with my team and our community. It’s definitely the start of a new chapter together.