Vanguards of Health Care by Bloomberg Intelligence
Sofinnova Partners Stays Optimistic on Biotech's Future
22 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What insights does Antoine Papiernik share about the future of biotech?
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Bloomberg Intelligence Vanguards of Healthcare podcast. It is the last one of the year for me, but it is with somebody whom I've known for a long, long time. And it's a real pleasure to get back together, even if it's virtual at the minute.
And these podcasters, you know, we speak with the leaders at the forefront of change in the healthcare industry and no one is closer to those changes than VCs, and no one's closer to those changes than VCs like Antoine that I've known for years. So my name is Sam Fazelli, and I'm a former biotech analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, which is the in-house research arm of Bloomberg.
Now, I'm thrilled to welcome Antoine Papiernique, a managing partner at Sofinova Partners. Plenty of stuff to talk about. The seven funds that the group runs, which are Many more than the first days that I remember Antoine from. I think probably Sofinova Capital was the first one, I guess. Sofinova is obviously a leading European life sciences venture capital firm founded in 1972.
So it's slightly younger than me. Just in 2025, the group raised one and a half billion euros.
Chapter 2: How does Sofinnova Partners leverage AI in biotech investments?
So combined with the group that I spoke with yesterday,
few weeks ago that was for beyond this these are these two firms along with eqt uh friends there and quite a few other vcs are at the forefront of leading investments into biotech and they are a european-based healthcare vc but obviously not just europe so almost half of that money that was raised went to the uh sofinova capital six eleven fund sorry eleven wow
Over 500 companies backed since 1972. Currently over 100 in the portfolio companies in the list. And a total of about 4 billion euros under management. So things have clearly gone in the right direction and very well for Antoine. Welcome, Antoine. It's really nice to have you with us.
Thank you, Sam. It's a pleasure to see you. Did you want to add a little bit? Well, yeah, just to remember indeed that we've met 25 or so years ago. And at the time, I joined this firm 28 years ago. And at the time, we had one strategy. That was the capital strategy that was investing out of its fund too when I joined in 97, which was a 47 million euro fund.
Chapter 3: What challenges does the biotech industry face today?
And I have to say, we did, in hindsight, miracles with very small amounts of money.
but we're also very very happy that we now have a lot more money so from this 47 million euro fund and we had a fund one that was 38 million euros so less than 100 million basically to do what we do and indeed today we've grown in multiple ways but just capital 11 being at 650 million euro you can see how much more we can do with a lot more money i think you know things have changed in biotech we need
More money to get to where you want to go, particularly if you want to reach your ultimate goal. And super happy to be in this position today, despite the environment. I'm sure we'll talk about the environment, but despite this, you know, I'm the optimist and I think, you know, we've gone a long way in Europe and we're right that way.
Yeah. I mean, you can't not be an optimist when you work in biotech, right? Because it's feast and famine at times. And also, you need that, I think, in order to see through the risks and look at the potential. And of course, you do capital management in a sensible way to try and get the risks taken care of as much as possible. But that is what biotech is.
And I have to say that I think Antoine is one of the most optimistic people that I remember sitting on panels with, etc. So it always was a pleasure to have those conversations. We didn't always agree, but I think a lot of it was more for making the panels more interesting.
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Chapter 4: How is the pharma patent cliff impacting biotech investments?
So where does Sofinova sit in the venture community in terms of approach? What is special, if anything, about the group and in terms of the way you look at things?
Yeah, so our motto is that we invest in people and science. And of course, people often count a lot in this equation. But I would say most investors would say the same, people and science. I think the way we've grown is that we have try to capture a lot of the different elements of the ecosystem, meaning we have strategies.
We have indeed seven different strategies and multiple funds within those strategies from super early acceleration incubation here. My partners in those strategies, both in biotech and medtech, are in fact entrepreneurs. They take those projects off academia in general and develop the companies themselves. That's the one thing that I think few people do in Europe.
In the US, you have a few famous funds who tend to do that. But in Europe, there's not that many people who actually take this level of risk. We're the team that you know, the management is our partners who take this.
Chapter 5: What role does AI play in drug discovery according to the guests?
So that's one element. Those are in general the, you know, smaller funds because they do really needlework, if you see what I mean. They create things from scratch with technologies and then bring them to the next step.
So that's one strategy on the earlier stage of the spectrum to through the capital funds, of course, that you mentioned that these are the traditional, in some way, early stage funds to the later stages. And we set up a a late-stage growth, or what we also call crossover fund, investing in late-stage clinical to even public investing.
So I think the way we portray ourselves is a platform where if you're an entrepreneur, if you are an early entrepreneur, you have someone to speak to that wants to listen to something that may be preclinical, to if you are a company that's already raised substantial venture money and you have de-raised your product, it's now in the clinic, but you need to run
a phase two B, a phase three, you need to bring this product to market, you have someone to speak to and so few know that. So few firms have this breadth of competence. We took the decision not to have one pot of money, like 4 billion euros you mentioned in AUM, with everyone just sort of tapping in that pot in order to do early stage, middle stage, later stage. We
think that it was more appropriate to hire people that really are specialists in all the different stages. And beside the stage, it's also something that is important to mention, we do biotech, and I would say it's the majority of what we do. Majority means more than 50%.
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Chapter 6: How does the European biotech landscape compare to the US?
In fact, it's probably about 60% of what we do. We do medtech, and then we do digital medicine, and we do what we call industrial biotech. That's biotech in particular for developing products using biotechnology outside of healthcare. If you look at this, you mentioned over 100 companies. I think it's 110 at today's count.
In the 60s, our pure biotech, biopharma addressing major drugs, addressing major unmet clinical need. We have about 25%, 20% of medical device from early incubation to middle stage to commercial stage. And then we have a growing digital medicine. I'm sure you're going to ask me the AI question at some point. And I'll tell you that this is also how we've evolved.
I think, got ahead in our thinking about how to use AI in healthcare in order to transform our industry.
Right, so when I look at these, Sophronova Capital is, for me at least, easy to understand. I know what the idea is, biotech companies mostly, right? Medical devices, I get that too. Crossover, yeah, I get that.
Chapter 7: What are the expectations for M&A activity in biotech for 2026?
We can talk about that in a minute, how the environment is for that particular area. Industrial biotech, I think I get that. So we're thinking, as you said, the application of biotechnology outside of developing medicines. So the name that comes to my mind is Novozymes. which is that kind of thing. Am I right? I mean, you can stop me each time and say, Sam, you're wrong.
No, no, it's totally exactly that.
And digital medicine is the one that I'm interested in why you separated that out. I'm going to make a guess and you tell me if I'm stupid or not. I'm assuming it's because digital medicine isn't just about application of AI to drug development because that would fit in biotech. I'm assuming this is because you also have hospital record keeping.
You have patient management during clinical trials and multiply. Is that right? Is that why it fits better in this bucket together as opposed to... You're absolutely right.
Chapter 8: What potential innovations in biotech are anticipated in the near future?
In fact, so we see... digital medicine, we define it in those two big pillars. One would be, I mean, another term you could use is tech bio. So those are the picks and shovels, the technologies that will help accelerate drug discovery, drug development. And those are not products. I mean, they are not clinical products.
Those are products you will use in order to develop better drugs, faster drugs, innovative drugs that you could not develop. But the clients of those companies, are the biotechs and the pharma companies. So these are, from a business model standpoint, more tech companies that will generate a turnover, an ARR, as they say.
So they will generate business in order to help those companies develop products. So that's one pillar of tech bio. And the other one, which is often referred to as health tech, is really all these technologies that connect the patient, the physician, the hospital.
So how do we improve on this, on where most of the costs are, which is, you know, that setting, you know, the patient is going to visit the hospital The physician in a hospital is where 80% of the cost of our healthcare systems are. And I think there's a lot that digital medicine, of course, the use of AI can do to improve that. So those are what we're focusing on.
And we thought you need to have a dedicated team to understand this. The co-investors, by the way, are very different. They are more tech co-investors rather than just the run-of-the-mill people who know about developing drugs.
Right, so I think we're going to talk about this. I'm going to bring this up now, as you saw in my list of questions that I sent you. It's a bit further down, but I think since we're on the topic, we'll talk about it now. And also the biotech. These are the two areas I know most and best. Medical devices is really not my space at all. So let's just talk about this AI topic here.
We've just conducted, it took us a long time to get this organized, a 600 plus C-suite survey for AI, which is published today. 10 or 12 questions general across the 600 folks and companies from about 1,000 individuals upwards, employees. And then we went and segmented the companies into 10 buckets, one of which was pharmaceuticals. So we have about 50 respondents. And we will come back to that.
I'm going to do a webinar of our own with my colleague with our findings from what they said about the impact of AI that they are looking at within their companies. But one of the key themes that seems to keep coming up is that the U.S.
seems to have pretty much, let's put China aside now because they have a different strategy that they're pursuing with NVIDIA, with the chat GPT, with OpenAI, with Anthropic, etc. They seem to have sewn up the world of AI models, except for one company, which doesn't come up enough in my view, which is Mistral.
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