Embla Medical narrows 2026 outlook

Proximity, capital and the ability to scale. When Nordic Life Science reported from life science hubs across Europe, from cities such as Gothenburg, Stockholm, Basel and Barcelona to the Flanders region and the UK as a whole, the same strengths, and the same bottlenecks, kept coming up.

A new report from insurer Zurich finds that the life science sector’s greatest challenges arise only after discovery. The organizations best positioned to succeed will not necessarily be those with the most medical breakthroughs, but those that can scale up, finance, and deliver innovation reliably.

A new study co-authored by Jonathan Ilicki, Life Science Strategy Lead at the Swedish venture capital firm Industrifonden, finds that investment and business-development professionals often misjudge rare-disease assets, underestimating launch performance and misreading when the assets are most commonly acquired.

The ongoing struggle in the Nordic countries to keep prescription drug prices affordable without shutting out innovative, more expensive therapies continues to frustrate pharmaceutical companies as the introduction of new drugs to the region slows.

Stockholm’s life science ecosystem has long shone brightly for its scientific excellence. Now, the region is tackling how to turn its world-class research, strong infrastructure, and an industrial legacy into sustained global competitiveness.

NordicRWE has established offices in Sweden and Denmark alongside its Oslo base, aiming to make it easier to run health data studies across the whole Nordic region – particularly in cancer, where precision medicine is splitting patients into ever-smaller subgroups.

From August 18 to 24, 2026, patients, physicians, caregivers, and supporters from around the world embarked on a six-day cycling expedition across Iceland with the purpose of accelerating research into multiple myeloma.