East of Berlin, Ahead of the Curve: A Field Report on Polish Biotech

Apparently it is impossible to escape your roots, as proved true in my case during the first day at BIO International Convention; the crowd carried me nowhere else but to the Polish Investment and Trade Agency booth. Call it gravity or heritage; either way, beginning among people who spoke my cultural shorthand gave me the momentum I needed to roam the rest of the convention halls with confidence. So as a gesture of gratitude and a bow towards the motherland, I’ll dedicate this article to polish companies at BIO 2025

A4BEE and QB Systems

“We are solving problems requiring adding, mixing and measuring,” A4BEE’s CEO Krzysztof Kaczor told me, as I was trying to put their outer-space-looking device in context. Turns out it was a Versatile Bioreactor for Cell Culture and Fermentation. First things first: a bioreactor is a device or system that provides a controlled environment for the growth of microorganisms, cells, or tissues. They offer a very user-friendly solution for any business dealing with any biological system requiring frequent control and modifications: algae, yeast, cell culture… you name it! Their priority, other than effectiveness and reliability, is ease of operating and modularity. Their machine follows LEGO-like design, all the cables are color-coded, so you don’t need hours of training, 100-page manual or a 24/7 support. This is great, given that solutions like that are supposed to simplify your research life, not add another layer of complexity. If you’re in academia or an early-stage biotech, you know the pain of countless alarms to wash cells/ add growth medium/ check on temperature etc… how nice would it be to have a “robot” do it! Well, now you have a solution straight from Poland (which would not take too much of your precious lab space).

Below you can see their Bioreactor. The team told me to pay special attention to the foam detector, which is their newest component;) Why would you need to detect foam, you may ask? Foam forms in a bioreactor when air and mixing cause proteins in the liquid to trap bubbles, so detecting it is important to avoid contamination, blocked sensors, poor oxygen flow, and spills. It’s important to keep your cell culture happy:)

The world turns out to be small, because they just developed a novel perfusion chamber for microfluids research and collaborated with NanOX (also present at bio) to develop hardware and software to support transport and recovery of donor kidneys; something of great interest to me relating to my current internship at University of Minnesota. TheNanOX Recovery Box (developed with engineering partner A4BEE) is an emerging, battery‑backed, integrated hardware/firmware/software platform designed to maintain controlled perfusion conditions and real‑time monitoring for donor kidneys (and future organs) during transport, with separated wet/dry zones to protect electronics and >2 hours of fully powered autonomous operation for out‑of‑hospital moves. Built from concept to functional prototype in roughly four months, the system is now being advanced toward a certification‑ready version that meets medical‑device and quality standards (ISO 13485, ISO 9001) through a multi‑unit build program funded by a ~PLN 2.3M agreement and supported by aligned QMS implementation across NanoSanguis (a NanoGroup subsidiary) and A4BEE.

They also have a great blog on everything concerning the Lab of the Future, so make sure to check them out!

Selvita

Selvita is one of the largest preclinical CROs in Europe. They are publicly traded, selling at 7.81 USD per share, as of July 13th. They had their own booth, with the name hanging from the ceiling (status symbol much;)). The best part, which I retroactively found out, was that they publish a lot in scientific journals; music to my ears!

The company fields ≈ 900 scientists across seven sites: Kraków, Poznań, Wrocław, Zagreb, Cambridge (UK), Boston and a commercial hub in San Francisco, occupying ~17 000 m² of purpose-built labs and already seasoned by 4 000-plus projects for about 750 clients. Their Polish core runs an integrated small-molecule engine: 1536-well and Echo-dispensed HTS (ultra-miniaturised high-throughput screening plates filled by an acoustic liquid handler), AI-guided medicinal chemistry, fragment and macrocycle libraries, and a structural-biology group that has solved more than 170 ligand complexes to date, feeding crystal data straight back into design loops. Wrocław, meanwhile, is an antibody foundry with two fully human phage-display libraries (10¹⁰-member synthetic and 10⁹-member naïve) able to deliver royalty-free IgG leads in roughly 12-15 weeks, with optional AI-guided affinity maturation and full developability panels. For translational read-outs, the Zagreb site (formerly Fidelta) offers >60 AAALAC- and OLAW-accredited in vitro and in vivo models (cell and animal disease systems vetted by global/U.S. animal-welfare bodies) spanning inflammation, fibrosis, infection and respiratory disease, plus matched human-tissue assays for cleaner PK/PD alignment. Layer on in-house ADME/DMPK, early tox, GLP bioanalysis and even GMP clinical-batch release, and you get a modular, end-to-end R&D stack that has already pushed more than 100 integrated programs forward, seven of which have entered the clinic.

It turns out they work a lot in fibrotic diseases, which share a lot of pathways with the aging process. I had a pleasure of talking with Dr. Kristy Winn about Selvita’s interests in expanding to cover more projects related to aging. A week after our encounter, they released a blog about senolytics and age related diseases, which concluded a three part series by Kristy about “healthy aging”. Although I believe that “healthy aging” is an oxymoron, things are moving for Selvita in that field, and I’m really excited to see more from them in the future!

Ardigen

Ardigen is a data-science CRO that sells algorithms and bioinformatic firepower which ranked as the global top-5 % of AI-focused research contractors. R&D groups drowning in multi-omics data who want targets, epitopes or biomarker signatures, but without building an internal data-science team would be potential Ardigen customers. Founded in Kraków in 2015, the company has grown to roughly 150-200 bioinformaticians, machine-learning scientists and software engineers with satellite offices in South San Francisco and Cambridge, MA. Lab-talk-wise, Ardigen owns almost no bench space; instead it deploys cloud-native platforms: ARDisplay models HLA-II presentation, while ARDentify matches immunopeptidomics spectra to precise HLA-bound peptides for neoantigen or TCR-T work; ARDitox flags dangerous T-cell cross-reactivity; and phenAID fuses cell-image, structural and omics data to predict the mechanism of action and bioactivity straight from phenotypic screens. A fresh Databricks partnership underpins its Clinical Data Lakehouse, letting sponsors unify trial datasets in a compliant, query-ready environment rather than a patchwork of CSVs and LIMS exports. The model works: Ardigen reports 300-plus projects for more than 60 biotech and pharma clients such as Boehringer Ingelheim, in its first eight years, as well as esteemed partners such as AWS or the Broad Institute. Moreover, in January 2025 Ardigen joined the NVIDIA Inception program, securing early access to NVIDIA’s high-performance GPUs, CUDA libraries and engineering support.

Bioforum - Polish Biotech Companies Association

Bioforum keeps member companies up-to-speed on the field’s fast-moving science by curating a constant flow of research news, best-practice exchanges and sector analyses, while simultaneously lobbying Warsaw, Brussels and other regulators through its seat in EuropaBio to ensure innovation-friendly policies for polish biotech. Beyond advocacy, BioForum runs the CEBioForum conference and partnering platform held annually since 2000 plus year-round webinars, seminars and specialist training that build both technical skills and deal-making networks.

This April, during their annual conference, they had a panel about longevity, featuring many good friends and “big names” in longevity such as Dr. Marek Postuła who is the founder of the polish healthy longevity medicine society and host of the #wstronedlugowiecznosci (towards longevity) radio show, Dr. Ricardo Gaminha Pacheco who is the BD and licensing director at Insilico Medicine and a fellow volunteer at the Longevity Education Hub and Dr Emil Syundyukov who is the CEO of Longenesis which provides digital platform for post-market research and patient engagement (I was SO proud and happy to see them win the Supernova Challenge 2.0 in Dubai, described as the world’s largest early-stage startup pitch competition!). That was just one panel in a whole lineup of fascinating discussion, so make sure you book your tickets to BioForum’s conference in 2026! BioForum’s president and CEO Dr. Magdalena Kulczycka and BioForum’s board member Grzegorz Dębowski shared with me during our discussion in Boston, how much action and investment BioForum is undertaking to make their conference the largest and most crucial biotech event in the region - they are clearly on an excellent path towards achieving that.

BioForum’s international reach was strengthened in 2024 when the union became Poland’s delegate to the International Council of Biotechnology Associations (ICBA), giving local firms a voice in global debates on biotech regulation and market access.

I cannot not mention their accelerator program, which although has ended the official admissions, still can accept some new members so pay attention! The “LEGO-block” program built to lift six pre-Series A biotech start-ups from TRL-3 science (established proof of concept) to investor-ready businesses in under a year. It begins with a Warsaw boot-camp and tailored mentoring to map each team’s gaps, then layers study visits to Belgium’s deep-tech ecosystem, weekly online workshops, and direct pitch sessions with international VCs and industry leaders; the two most promising cohorts earn free lab space through February 2026 to fast-track their R&D. Graduates showcase their progress on the CEBioForum stage, tapping the association’s 20-year network while continuing to receive post-acceleration support as alumni and future mentors.

Photo by BioForum

Polpharma

I’ve talked about CROs and associations, now let’s talk about manufacturers. Polpharma Group is Poland’s flagship pharma manufacturer and one of Central-Eastern Europe’s biggest drug suppliers: founded in 1935, still privately owned, it now ships ≈400 million medicine packs a year to 40-plus markets, employs ~5,600 people and books >€1.1 billion in annual revenue. The small-molecule arm runs five GMP plants (a GMP plant is a pharmaceutical-manufacturing facility that has been inspected and licensed to operate under Good Manufacturing Practice regulations) covering sterile injectables and solid and semi-solid forms. Polpharma is currently pouring $45 million into expanding its API CDMO capacity, which will be its in-house, GMP-certified contract development and manufacturing lines for complex active pharmaceutical ingredients so it can become the EU’s go-to on-shore supplier of hard-to-make drug actives. On the biologics front, Polpharma Biologics (a sister company under the same shareholder) co-develops biosimilars with partners such as Formycon/Bioeq and STADA: its ranibizumab programme has already secured FDA interchangeability (Cimerli™, 2022) and most recently won approvals in Canada (2023) and Brazil (2025). This drug could be of particular attention to anybody in aging, as it targets age-related macular degeneration. Ranibizumab blocks VEGF-A and is injected intravitreally to halt the leaky, sight-stealing neovascularisation that drives wet age-related macular degeneration, diabetic macular edema and other retinal pathologies. Late-stage ustekinumab and ustekinumab-next-gen projects are moving through EMA and FDA filings, both targeting subunits of interleukins 12 and 23 to treat plaque psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis and other autoimmune diseases.

On a fun note, they made their own game that can teach you a lot about the drug manufacturing process. Miasteczko Lekowe (Drug town) is Polpharma’s free, browser-based strategy game that lets players build a miniature drug-manufacturing campus from the ground up adding labs, production lines, warehouses and R&D suites while a realistic process simulator walks them through each chemical, pharmaceutical and quality-control step that turns an idea into a finished medicine, mirroring the workflows in Polpharma’s real GMP plants. I highly recommend to check it out!

Polbionica

Let’s finish this post with one of the most exciting companies for me: Polbionica. They are a Warsaw-based spin-off from the Foundation for Research and Science Development that pioneers 3-D bioprinting of living tissues; their headline project is a fully vascularized “bionic pancreas” printed from a patient’s own cells to restore insulin and glucagon secretion in type 1 diabetes, a world-first prototype achieved in 2019 and now moving toward clinical translation (first transplant is expected in 2026!!). Check out their paper where they share details. Beyond the pancreas, the 150-strong team formulates proprietary dECM-enriched bio-inks and offers scalable printing platforms for organoids, islet niches and other regenerative-medicine applications, positioning itself as a materials-and-technology supplier to the wider tissue-engineering community. Recognition has followed quickly: Life Sciences Review named Polbionica “3-D Bioprinting Solutions Company of the Year 2025,” venture investors have backed its organ-biofabrication roadmap, and a June 2025 agreement with the University of Zielona Góra and the Lubuskie region will add a new R&D hub to accelerate pre-clinical studies. Although they never said that on their website, my aging-research-oriented eye notices the huge potential for replacement strategy with bionic organs - might come sooner than organ cryobanking!

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Poland’s life-science scene no longer hides behind “emerging” labels. There are antibody design libraries in Wrocław, 3-D-prints vascularised organs in Warsaw, and lobbying Brussels with the same confidence in selling APIs to forty markets. Whether you need a snap-on AI engine (Ardigen), an end-to-end wet lab (Selvita), or a stretch goal as wild as a bionic pancreas (Polbionica), there’s a Polish address that will pick up the phone. So here’s my gentle nudge: the next time you’re scouting partners, start your pin map east of Berlin, and you might find the talent, grit and energy that carried me through Day 1 in Boston and still has me buzzing weeks later.