Ten years after its inauguration, Luxembourg’s House of BioHealth now hosts 40 innovative companies from the life sciences, ICT, and eco-technology sectors. CEO Jean-Paul Scheuren explains the House of BioHealth’s role in transforming the future of healthcare.
“The House of BioHealth was created out of a need: we had a national strategy to attract companies in the life science sector, but we had no possibilities to host them,” explains CEO Jean-Paul Scheuren upon the tenth anniversary of the incubator. These companies needed offices, as well as labs – and Luxembourg didn’t have a place to host them, he continues. “So we decided to create the House of BioHealth as an accelerator and [a place to offer] lab infrastructure to companies. And we were right: today, we see that the House is quite full. It was a good decision!”
Located on Rue Henri Koch in Esch-sur-Alzette, the House of BioHealth was inaugurated in February 2015. On offer? Nearly 10,000 square metres of lab space – including facilities that follow “good manufacturing practices,” which are standards that a medicines manufacturer must meet in production – and 8,000 square metres of office space and conference rooms. But it doesn’t just provide space for research, Scheuren points out. “What we try to do is really build up this ecosystem, so people can not only get infrastructure, but also get access to information and access to customers, access to service providers.”
In 2008, Luxembourg prioritised health technologies as a way to diversify its economy, according to the grand duchy’s economy ministry. Since then, it has concentrated on medical devices, in vitro diagnostics and digital health. The “Health Technologies” unit, for instance, aims to help position the country as a European healthtech “hub” when it comes to the development, assessment, and adoption of digital health technologies. The country’s healthtech sector consists of almost 140 companies; around one-third of these develop digital health tools.
From space-based drug discovery to a “gut-on-a-chip”
Today, the House of BioHealth hosts roughly 40 companies, adds Scheuren. Twenty of them are bigger companies and 20 are smaller startups. Companies come from three main sectors: life sciences, ICT, and eco-technology.
The companies hosted in the House include: Flen Health, a medical device company focusing on wound and skin healing solutions; ITTM Solutions, which specialises in the management and integration of health-related data; Exobiosphere, a biotech startup that works on drug discovery in outer space (in April, it raised €2 million in a seed round); OrganoTherapeutics, which aims to speed up the development of therapeutics against neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s (the startup is one of the finalists of the 2025 edition of the Healthcare Week Luxembourg awards, whose winner will be announced during the HWL conference on 7-8 October); and Nium, a spinoff from the University of Luxembourg that has created a “gut-on-a-chip platform” to investigate how food can affect the gut microbiome. Uplift 360 – which develops technology to recycle and reuse materials – is an example of a company from the cleantech sector.
Beyond the lab and office spaces, the House of BioHealth also offers an incubator for startups that allows them to “plug and play.” “You come with your computer and you can start directly,” explains Scheuren. And “there’s also support for the companies who are in this incubator.”
Looking ahead to the HE:AL campus
“The House of BioHealth is the first step to the HE:AL campus,” adds Scheuren, referring to the 140,000-square metre campus for healthtech companies whose construction is planned next to the House of BioHealth. “In the context of the HE:AL campus, we created the company Hive Services, and Hive Services will build up the network facilities for the companies. So there, we are really helping people to connect with the right partners to get to the next step.”
The HE:AL campus will be a “phygital” campus; its physical building in Esch will be combined with a digital approach. “It’s not necessarily just companies coming from Europe; we are willing to attract companies that come from far away, outside of Europe,” he says. Meracle Health, for instance, is a spinoff from the National University of Singapore that has developed a solution to help manage chronic respiratory conditions and is hosted at the House of BioHealth. The startup is also in the running for an award at Healthcare Week Luxembourg.
In a Europe that is rapidly aging and facing increasing burdens on its healthcare systems, the HE:AL campus offers the “possibility to lift the future of healthcare in Europe,” says Scheuren. With a focus on four Ps – preventive, predictive, personalised medicine, plus patient participation – and a shift in mindset from “cures” to “wellbeing,” he concludes, “we will be able to show how we can re-organise healthcare from what it is today to the wellbeing approach that we want it to be in the future.”
