Our Take
VIB has built a working playbook for spinoff success in a fractured funding landscape, but the institute's own director admits the European system is broken—and no amount of local networking fixes a capital shortage.
Why it matters
European biotech leaders are now vocal about the funding gap that forces researchers toward US investors or exit. VIB's model shows spinoffs can happen; it does not show how to fund the 98% of ideas that never get a hearing.
Do this week
Biotech founders: audit your grant strategy this week—if you're banking on a single EU call with a 2% success rate, parallel-track conversations with US VCs or corporate partnerships (Boehringer Ingelheim, Novartis, Gates Foundation) now.
VIB has built a €2 billion spinoff ecosystem in Ghent despite EU funding scarcity
The Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (Flemish Institute for Biotechnology) operates as a non-profit research center with nearly 2,000 scientists from 80 countries. Since its 1995 founding by the Flemish government, VIB has created 40 spinoffs that attracted approximately €2 billion in total investment (company-reported). Current spinouts operating from VIB's Bio-Incubator in Ghent include Orionis Biosciences, which signed a $1.4 billion deal with Novartis for molecular glue discovery and a $2 billion pact with Genentech, and Obulytix, focused on antimicrobial resistance using engineered lysins against Gram-negative bacteria.
VIB also spun out Rainbow Crops two years ago to address climate-driven crop losses. The Gates Foundation awarded Rainbow Crops a $7 million grant for sorghum and rice genome editing using AI, followed by a €9.7 million seed round from EuroInvest. Other spinouts include Augustine Therapeutics for Charcot-Marie Tooth disease inhibitors and Ablynx, a nanobody developer acquired by Sanofi in 2018.
The institute partners with universities and industry on foundational research. VIB and Vrije Universiteit Brussel discovered the bacterial pore protein CsgG, which Oxford Nanopore Technologies licensed to build portable DNA and RNA sequencers (MinION and PromethION). VIB collaborated with KU Leuven and UZ Leuven to develop an HRD test for ovarian cancer diagnosis at one-fifth the cost of the US equivalent ($5,000 vs. the American test), now reimbursed in Belgium with over 800 patients tested.
The funding crisis is structural, not local
Jérôme Van Biervliet, VIB's managing director, stated bluntly: "It's really essential that in Europe we start funding innovation or we will lose our share of voice in the global pipeline. It's as simple as that. We'll be stuck becoming an importer of innovative goods and services."
Only 2% of the thousands of grant submissions VIB receives are funded (company-reported). Van Biervliet called this "a disgrace" and framed the low success rate as a brake on economic development. VIB offers its own bridge funding through Biotope, a biotech accelerator and pre-seed investor, but this addresses symptom, not cause. The institute hosts 10 to 15 startups in its Bio-Incubator, providing lab facilities and access to talent, yet the real bottleneck remains capital allocation at the national and EU level.
Recent research focus areas at VIB show where investment has begun to concentrate: oncology, neuroscience, and AI applications. Orionis uses AI to analyze protein-protein interactions in living cells; Rainbow Crops combined genome editing with AI to accelerate crop breeding. AI adoption across portfolio companies signals where VIB sees competitive advantage, but scaling these initiatives depends on funding that has not materialized at European pace.
Build redundancy into your capital plan
Spinout founders and biotech CTOs should treat EU grants as a necessary but insufficient funding source. The 2% success rate means the expected value of a single grant application is near zero; diversification is not optional. Obulytix secured pharma backing from Boehringer Ingelheim; Orionis attracted mega-pharma deal flow; Rainbow Crops accessed Gates Foundation capital. None relied on grant funding alone as the primary signal or capital source.
For researchers embedded in institutes like VIB, the lesson is different: document your IP, maintain founder networks outside your home country, and prepare a corporate partnership or equity raise in parallel with any grant submission. VIB's track record is real, but it reflects survivor bias—the 40 spinoffs that succeeded represent the 2% that found capital elsewhere.