“A key challenge and gap that we’ve had in Finland is that the academic drug compounds or hit compounds are not really what the industry or the investors are expecting them to be in terms of how they’ve been developed and how mature they are,” says Maarit Merla, CEO of the Finnish Drug Discovery Center (DD Center) and chair of the board of the industry association Finnish Bioindustries, to NLS.

DD Center is a state-owned special assignment company under the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, created to strengthen Finland’s early‑stage drug development pipeline. The center channels EUR 20 million of state funding into early drug development and can invest up to EUT 500,000 per company. They work with preclinical companies and research teams, to bring anything from basic academic research to more advanced drug development programmes to lead optimization stages.

Beyond capital, the centre offers hands‑on scientific and strategic guidance. 

Measure of success

Beyond capital, the centre offers hands‑on scientific and strategic guidance. 

“We are helping with industry professionals on how to develop those early stages so that the outcome is investible and of interest to pharma companies,” Merla says. 

She describes their success metric simply: “Our measure of success is that someone else invests after us. That is a testament to us doing the right things and helping the companies to become more mature in their scientific package,” she says.

Finland is more advanced in medical devices and health tech solutions

But finding the right investors can be a real challenge for Finnish startups, according to Merla. “We’re struggling more than the peers in other Nordic countries because we don’t have many Finnish investors. Many are looking for a local Finnish lead investor to get into financing their company. We struggle with that because there are only a few in the country that will invest in therapeutics,” she says.

“You need a lot of things to line up in order to have a successful startup – you need the right mindset, and be very optimistic and very resilient,” says Merla.

Given the country’s legacy in technology – with well-known companies like Nokia and Oura Health – Merla muses that it’s no wonder that Finland is more advanced in medical devices and health tech solutions. 

I remain optimistic, I think the new generation is more entrepreneurial than the earlier ones.

“We’ve not seen the same kind of evolution in the therapeutics area yet. I think the number of new biotech startups is way too slow, too,” she says. 

“I remain optimistic, I think the new generation is more entrepreneurial than the earlier ones,” Merla says, and continues: “You need a lot of things to line up in order to have a successful startup – you need the right mindset, and be very optimistic and very resilient. I think we are moving in the right direction, but slower than we could.”