Christina von Messling is a foresight advisory partner at Foresight Factory, which works with clients such as HSBC, Carlsberg Group, Accor, Ford, and British Airways. She has been working in technology and innovation for the past decade, most recently as the head of Europe at the Future Today Strategy Group, where she led the group’s health, climate, and entertainment verticals. Prior roles include management consulting in automotive and senior leadership in media and communications. Her current focus is the evolution of AI, meshed realities, and synthetic biology and how technological innovation intersects with economic relevance and human impact. Von Messling holds a Master’s degree in law from the Freie Universität Berlin and splits her time between London and Berlin. She recently spoke to The Innovator about why the fate of Europe’s pharma industry hangs in the balance.
Q: In a recent guest essay for the Berlin Global Dialogue, you predicted that by 2036 the European pharmaceutical industry will no longer exist in its current form and that this could have grave consequences for the Continent. Please elaborate.
CVM: The way that research is conducted and drugs are developed is going to change completely due to advances in AI and synthetic biology. Drug discovery used to compete on the quality of its science. Synthetic biology flips that: biology becomes a manufacturing platform, and the competitive advantage moves to whoever can run the fastest design-build-test-learn cycle. That speed is determined by the models run, the data those models are trained on, and the biofoundry infrastructure executing the cycle. Europe built world-class capability in the old paradigm: precision chemistry, rigorous manufacturing, deep scientific expertise. Those strengths won’t disappear. But these will be made contingent on a foundation layer Europe may not control. The science will happen elsewhere if the foundational investments that would make Europe a builder rather than a buyer are not made. Unfortunately, the ground is shifting quickly enough and invisibly enough that most decision-makers will not register it until the dependency is already structural.
Q: What is the potential impact on healthcare in Europe?
CVM: The impact on European healthcare will be consequential. AI-driven discovery, concentrated in oncology, metabolic disease, and autoimmune disorders, will move from filing to approval in the U.S. and in China, but not in Europe. AI models will be trained on someone else’s priorities, someone else’s populations, and someone else’s values about what transparency means. That’s not all: the genetic variants that determine how Europeans process drugs may not be screened if development happens elsewhere. The upshot of all of this? By 2036 a child born in Europe could have a shorter life expectancy than one born in the United States or China.
Q: Isn’t Europe making foundational investments to avoid this scenario?
CVM: Yes, but its efforts will likely fall short. Europe’s AI gigafactories, built primarily around research consortia rather than commercial actors, won’t generate the private-sector innovation velocity their architects promised. The chips powering them will be Nvidia’s, procured under the EU-U.S. trade framework, adding a sovereign dependency at the base of the infrastructure Europe builds to reduce its dependencies. The EHDS [European Health Data Space, an EU regulation establishing a common framework for the secure access, exchange, and reuse of electronic health data across the European Union] will open data access for patient summaries and prescriptions, but the EHDS does not open a harmonized European route to the categories that matter most for biology-specific models, genomic and omics data, for secondary use until 2031, and likely later in practice. And public anxiety about data sharing, amplified by disinformation and eroding institutional trust, is expected to make it politically costly to accelerate.
What’s more, public budgets that might have seeded the foundational infrastructure are likely to be consumed elsewhere: defense commitments could absorb the funding that technology sovereignty required. On the private side, the calculus will be equally rational and paralyzing: no single company could build the ecosystem alone, and without public commitment to anchor it, none will try. The only remaining option will be to buy or lease access to the foundational ecosystem, adding a new layer of strategic dependency.
Q: Under this scenario, who is likely to dominate the market?
CVM: A small number of AI-native platform businesses, predominantly American and Chinese, that own the foundation models, the biofoundry networks, and the training data that determine what drugs get designed, for whom, and on whose terms. The risk is that Roche, Sanofi, GSK, and Bayer will survive in reduced form with depleted pipelines, and their most valuable remaining assets will be increasingly targeted for acquisition by the companies that have replaced them at the top of the value chain.
Q: This sounds disturbingly similar to what happened with artificial intelligence. Hasn’t Europe learned its lesson?
CVM: What could happen in pharma between 2029 and 2036 is the first visible consequence of a pattern already operating in AI, only faster. Europe does not have an awareness problem. In every conversation I have with senior leaders across Europe, the diagnosis is the same: we need a unified market, higher investment in innovation, greater risk appetite. The agreement on what needs to happen is not the bottleneck. Action is. In my essay for the Berlin Global Dialogue, I outlined what is holding Europe back:
Culture: Europe built societies the world genuinely admires: craftsmanship over speed, deep expertise, performance balanced with protection. These are strengths. But they carry a specific cost in a moment that rewards iteration over perfection.
Cognition: Values, held long enough, become architecture. The same commitment to craftsmanship, expertise, and protection that built Europe’s admired societies also built its institutions: regulatory frameworks designed to ensure nothing fails, funding structures that reward proven expertise over untested ideas, procurement cycles optimized for certainty over speed. In a paradigm where competitive advantage belongs to whoever runs the fastest design-build-test-learn cycle, that logic does not just slow things down. It selects against the behavior the moment requires.
Capital: Investment follows from both. Europe has deep, patient, long-term capital. It has built a functioning early-stage ecosystem. What it lacks is the scale-up capital, the Series B and beyond, that turns promising companies into the foundational infrastructure players the moment requires. The gap is not accidental. It is structural. The biofoundries were not built. The foundation models were not trained. Not because the money did not exist. Because the decision architecture was not built to greenlight bets that will mostly fail before one succeeds.
Q: How can Europe break the cycle?
CVM: It will require collaboration at two levels simultaneously — across nations, and across the public and private sectors — as well as capital that European institutions currently cannot deploy.
On the data layer, we need a European health data architecture where each country retains sovereignty over its population data but contributes to a shared training commons under agreed governance terms. The EHDS provides the legal framework. What is missing is the shared infrastructure underneath it and the political will to accelerate access to the data categories that actually matter for biological AI models, genomic and omics data, currently locked until 2031.
On the biofoundry layer, we need a coordinated cross-European network of shared physical infrastructure, publicly seeded and privately operated, that gives European researchers and companies access to competitive Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle speeds without requiring each nation to build the full stack alone. The model exists. Airbus was founded by the governments of France, Germany, the UK, and Spain with the explicit goal of avoiding dependence on American manufacturers. It was seeded with public launch aid, handed to industry to run, and became commercially self-sustaining within two decades. The governance structure was deliberately designed so that partners had to be unanimous to stop it, not to proceed. That asymmetry is what made collaboration possible. What overcame the hesitancy was not trust. It was the shared recognition that the alternative was worse.
The capital question is equally structural. European pension funds hold €2.7 trillion in assets and contribute just 5% of continental venture capital, compared to over 50% in the US. The reasons are partly regulatory. Solvency II requires European insurers to hold capital reserves of up to 49% against unlisted equity investments. Government bonds carry no equivalent charge. From January 2027, a reform cuts that charge to 22% for qualifying long-term holdings, which shows the lever can move, though the standard charge stays high. Pension funds face analogous constraints under IORP II, which nudge them toward safe, liquid assets. The result is the same in both cases: the rules make government bonds structurally preferable to foundational technology bets. Reforming those regulatory levers would unlock European capital that already exists.
The second lever is retail. Europeans save more than Americans. But more than a third of EU household wealth sits in deposits, compared to about a tenth in the US. That capital is not unavailable, but it is structurally misdirected. Mobilizing it is a policy choice. The same logic applies to the biofoundry and data layers. And it requires one further adjustment: within these structures, we need to build in deliberate room for experimentation and the tolerance for failure that comes with it. Not the Silicon Valley version, which treats failure as performance. The European version: controlled, bounded, evaluated, and learned from.
Our culture will not change, nor should it. But our cognitive patterns and our capital rules can change, and the regulations that lock European pension funds out of European venture capital can be reformed. These are policy choices, not cultural destiny.
Q: What would you like readers to take away from this interview?
CVM: Europe can avoid the mistakes that left it lagging in large language models. In pharma, the window is already closing. In AI and synthetic biology, it is still open, and that is where acting now still counts. We urgently need to put the right mechanisms in place if we do not want to be left behind again.
