More sequencing capacity
The agenda calls for greater genome-sequencing capacity in Germany, the foundation for genetic diagnostics and for research on the causes of disease.
03.06 Science & Technology
Biotechnology and the life sciences
Biotechnology is one of the six key technologies in the High-Tech Agenda Germany. Under Dorothee Bär, the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) has set dated goals for gene and cell therapy, mRNA cancer medicine and AI-driven drug development, and has made women's health a focus of its medical research.
>1,000
Biotechnology companies in Germany
Source: Pharmazeutische Zeitung, July 2025~56,000
People employed in the sector
Source: Pharmazeutische Zeitung, July 2025€11bn
Approximate annual sector revenue
Source: Pharmazeutische Zeitung, July 20252028
Target year for a first approved mRNA cancer immunotherapy
Source: BMFTR roadmap, May 202601 — The basics
What biotechnology actually is
At its simplest, biotechnology means using living cells, or the molecules they make, to produce something useful.
Brewing and baking are ancient forms of it. Modern biotechnology began when scientists learned to read and edit DNA, the molecule that stores the instructions every cell follows. Those instructions are written in genes; cells read genes to build proteins, which do most of the work in the body.
For politics, the field matters for three reasons. It produces medicines that chemistry alone cannot make. It underpins parts of agriculture and industrial production. And it is research-intensive, so the countries that fund strong laboratories tend to capture the companies that grow out of them.
DNA
The instruction set
A long, double-stranded molecule. Its sequence of four chemical "letters" encodes genes. Sequencing means reading that order; Germany's agenda aims to expand sequencing capacity.
mRNA
The working copy
Cells copy a gene into messenger RNA, which is then translated into a protein. mRNA medicines deliver such a copy so that the body makes a protein itself, for example one that trains the immune system.
Protein
The machinery
Enzymes, antibodies and receptors are proteins. Many modern drugs, including antibodies, are proteins produced in living cells.
Cell
The factory and the therapy
In cell therapies, a patient's or donor's cells are modified and returned as the medicine. Gene therapies add, silence or correct a gene directly.
02 — Policy
Biotechnology in the High-Tech Agenda
The federal cabinet adopted the High-Tech Agenda Germany on 30 July 2025. It names six key technologies and sets out around €18 billion of funding up to 2029, including €5.5 billion from special funds. Biotechnology is one of the six. A day later, the trade press summarised the ministry's plans for the sector.
AI-driven drug development
Projects using artificial intelligence to find and develop drugs are to start from the second quarter of 2026, one of the agenda's flagship goals listed by the Bundestag.
Gene and cell therapy translation centre
Support for the Berlin Center for Gene and Cell Therapies, a joint undertaking of the Charité university hospital and Bayer, intended to move new therapies from the laboratory into clinical use.
A European role
Germany is to take on a role in a European biotechnology partnership by 2027, linking the national plan to EU programmes (see European technology policy).
Verified fact On 20 May 2026 Bär presented the first six technology roadmaps, biotechnology among them, to the Bundestag research committee, followed by a six-week public consultation. The roadmap milestones include the first approval of an mRNA cancer immunotherapy by 2028 and a gene and cell therapy translation centre by 2028. The wider framework is described on the High-Tech Agenda page.
03 — Translation
From laboratory to patient
The goals for 2028 are not about discovery alone. They concern translation: the slow, expensive passage from a promising result in a laboratory to a therapy a doctor can prescribe. That is where the ministry's measures concentrate, and where German biomedicine has long been said to lose ground.
Analysis Several features make the passage hard. Academic laboratories rarely have the facilities to manufacture a therapy to the standard required for use in people. Clinical trials are long and costly. Cell and gene therapies are often produced individually for each patient, which makes production and quality control difficult to scale. And universities, hospitals and companies work to different incentives. A translation centre is an attempt to place those actors under one roof.
mRNA has a particular resonance in Germany. German companies were among the pioneers of mRNA medicine, and one of the first mRNA COVID-19 vaccines was developed in Mainz. Using the same platform against cancer, by training the immune system to recognise a tumour, is a long-standing research aim; the roadmap sets 2028 as the target year for a first approval of such an immunotherapy.
- Stage 1
Basic research
Understanding a disease mechanism or a target molecule in cells and models, mainly at universities and research institutes.
- Stage 2
Pre-clinical development
Designing a candidate therapy, testing safety and effect in the laboratory; this is where AI-driven drug design is meant to save time.
- Stage 3 · The "valley of death"
Manufacturing and first trials
Producing the therapy to clinical-grade standard and running first studies in people. The Berlin translation centre targets this gap.
- Stage 4
Larger clinical trials
Evidence of benefit in larger patient groups, usually with industry partners.
- Stage 5 · Goal: 2028
Approval and use
Regulatory approval and use in hospitals. The roadmap's mRNA target sits here.
04 — Data and algorithms
Why AI appears in a biotech plan
Drug discovery is a search problem. AI is being asked to narrow the search before the expensive experiments begin.
A typical drug candidate must bind to the right target, avoid harmful side effects and reach the right tissue. Machine-learning models trained on biological and chemical data can predict some of these properties, propose new molecules and help choose which experiments to run first. Protein-structure prediction has become one of the most visible examples of what such models can do.
The High-Tech Agenda links biotechnology and artificial intelligence, its first key technology, explicitly. AI-driven drug development projects are scheduled to begin from the second quarter of 2026.
Analysis The limits are well known among researchers. Models are only as good as their training data, and much clinical data in Germany is fragmented across hospitals and protected by strict data-protection rules. A prediction is a hypothesis, not a result: every candidate still has to pass laboratory tests and clinical trials. Supporters argue that even modest gains in the early stages save years; sceptics caution that the bottleneck often lies later, in trials and manufacturing.
The ministry's separate plans for a research data law, which would create a centre for access to microdata, bear on this question; they are discussed on the research policy page.
05 — Women's health
Medicine that takes sex and gender into account
The clearest personal emphasis Bär has set in medical research concerns women's health. The figures below are drawn from reporting by the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the German medical association's journal, and should be read as reported.
According to Deutsches Ärzteblatt reporting, Bär made women's health a focus of the Science Year 2026 (Wissenschaftsjahr), which runs under the title "Medizin der Zukunft" (Medicine of the Future). The Science Years are an established federal format for bringing a research theme to a general audience through exhibitions, events and school programmes.
The same reporting states that the BMFTR is providing around €18 million a year for research on women's health and gender-sensitive medicine, roughly €90 million over the legislative period; that a dedicated women's-health unit was set up in the ministry in November 2025; and that endometriosis, a common and often late-diagnosed chronic condition, is a stated focus.
Analysis The underlying research problem is uncontroversial. For decades many clinical studies included mainly men, and differences in how diseases present and how drugs act in women were under-studied. Gender-sensitive medicine aims to close those gaps. Whether a sum of this size changes much will depend on how the money is allocated and whether the focus outlasts a single Science Year.
- Science Year 2026
- "Medizin der Zukunft"; women's health set as a focus, according to Deutsches Ärzteblatt.
- Annual funding
- Around €18 million a year for women's health and gender-sensitive medicine (reported).
- Legislative period
- Roughly €90 million in total (reported).
- Ministry unit
- A women's-health unit set up in November 2025 (reported).
- Named condition
- Endometriosis, a stated focus (reported).
06 — Responsibilities
What a research ministry can and cannot do
Biomedicine involves several federal ministries and European agencies. Knowing who is responsible for what helps to read the ministry's goals realistically.
01Does the research ministry approve medicines?
No. Medicines are approved by regulators: for most innovative therapies centrally through the European Medicines Agency, with national authorities such as the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut, which is responsible for vaccines and advanced therapies, and the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM). The research ministry funds research and infrastructure. A target such as "first approval of an mRNA cancer immunotherapy by 2028" therefore describes an outcome the ministry hopes its funding will help bring about, not a decision it can take.
02How does this differ from the health ministry's role?
The Federal Ministry of Health is responsible for the health system, statutory health insurance and the law on medicines. The BMFTR funds health research, including large research networks and the translation of research into clinical practice. Many questions that decide the fate of new therapies, such as reimbursement and access to health data, sit with health policy.
03Is gene therapy the same as gene editing?
Not quite. Gene therapy is the broad term for treating disease by changing genetic material in a patient's cells, for instance by adding a working copy of a gene. Gene editing, with tools such as CRISPR, changes the existing DNA sequence at a precise location. Both are covered by the gene and cell therapy goals; therapies for patients concern body cells only, not changes that would be inherited.
04Why does sequencing capacity matter?
Reading the genome of patients and of tumours has become routine in research and is increasingly used in diagnosis, especially for rare diseases and cancer. Large sequencing programmes need laboratories, computing power and secure data infrastructure. Expanding that capacity is a precondition for personalised medicine and for AI models trained on genetic data.
05What is the industrial side of biotechnology?
Beyond medicine, "white" or industrial biotechnology uses microorganisms and enzymes to make chemicals, materials and food ingredients, often with less energy than conventional processes. It ties the field to Germany's chemical industry and to climate goals. The ministry's published goals so far concentrate on the medical side.
07 — The debate
Ambition, timelines and evidence
The biotechnology goals share the strengths and weaknesses of the High-Tech Agenda as a whole. They are concrete and dated, which makes them easy to check. They also depend on actors the ministry does not control: regulators, hospitals, investors and companies.
Supporters argue
Germany has strong academic medicine, a sizeable sector of more than 1,000 firms and recent proof, in mRNA vaccines, that research can become a global product.
Dated milestones and a translation centre address the weak point of the system, the step from discovery to clinic, rather than funding research in general.
Critics and sceptics argue
Approval of a new therapy by 2028 is not something a ministry can deliver; it depends on trial outcomes and regulators.
The opposition Greens have questioned whether the government can show the actual effect of the money spent under its roadmaps, arguing that strategy documents and dialogue formats are no substitute for evidence of results.
Criticism In May 2026, a year into Bär's term, the Greens' research spokesperson Ayse Asar said the government talked of strategic roadmaps but could not answer central questions such as the real impact of the funds deployed. The ministry replied that projects were progressing in planning and implementation. The general debate is set out on the criticism and controversies page; the funding picture is on science and research funding.
Analysis For Bär, the life sciences are less a personal specialism than a portfolio inherited with the ministry. Her contribution so far lies in priority-setting: the dated roadmap goals and the choice of women's health as a visible theme. The outcomes by which those choices will be judged, approvals and functioning translation infrastructure, fall in 2028 and later.