If you know what an NMT phone is, or, even more so, if you’ve ever used one, it’s likely that you are formerly young. Slightly less so in Iceland, where well into the 2000s lots of the cool kids still had NMT phones in their jeeps. Your trusty Nokia 3310 could go several days on a charge, but drive away from a town or up a valley and the coverage quickly got spotty. With an NMT, though, you could head up toward the highlands or the upper reaches of a river and never be out of touch.

The Life Science Cluster turns ten. But instead of looking in the rearview mirror, let’s look at why life science will matter more over the next decade.

When people think of life science innovation, they often think of new medicines. Yet many of the innovations transforming healthcare today – from AI-powered diagnostics to robotic surgery and remote patient monitoring – are driven by medtech companies. With my own multiyear background in the medtech industry, this section of life science has a special place in my heart.

The story of Finnish biotechnology is not a straightforward success story. It is a story of an ambitious start, of setbacks, and of stubborn rebuilding – and of what happens when a field that demands patience meets short-term expectations. As Finnish Bioindustries turns 20, it is a good moment to look back.

Presentations at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) show a field moving rapidly forward both with regard to treatments and diagnostics. 

As a policy insider who has dealt with the intricacies of life science, I am aware of the challenge of taking a molecule from bench to bedside. It’s an arduous journey that more often than not ends in disappointment. Policy work follows a surprisingly similar trajectory. Years of work for passing a minor legislative change may, in the end, yield little to nothing. 

Last month, The Life Science Cluster attracted a record number of investors to its annual Investor Partnering Day in Oslo. Interest in life sciences is clearly growing. But why and why now?

Every successful region has a place where collaboration is allowed to take root and grow. A place that protects early ideas, carries learning forward, and helps people work together across borders even when the systems around them are not built for it. In Medicon Valley, many now share a simple vision: to create a kind of greenhouse for Nordic life science cooperation.

There isn’t enough high-quality and deep multimodal data, on enough people, in benchmarkable structures that participants and practitioners trust, to build the large general healthcare models required. And that’s where Iceland comes in.

Geopolitics is no longer background noise, but an obvious risk factor shaping strategy and timelines. In this new reality, investors and clusters can help entrepreneurs build resilience. Not just by supplying capital, but by strengthening decision-making under uncertainty.