Published on April 28, 2026 by Laurent LAFFERRERE
Preparing for Health Crises: The Structuring Role of Biomanufacturing in Health System Resilience
This document presents France BioLead’s contribution to the referral of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE), the French constitutional advisory assembly tasked with informing public authorities on key economic, social, and environmental policies.
Preparing for health crises does not rely solely on planning, but on the actual ability to rapidly produce and deliver the necessary health products. In this context, biomanufacturing is a strategic lever for strengthening health system resilience.
This industrial capacity is built over the long term: it depends on complex infrastructure, highly skilled talent, and stringent regulatory requirements, which can only be effectively mobilized during a crisis if they already exist beforehand.
At the same time, medicines are undergoing a profound transformation: around 60% of those currently in development are biologics, whose production is more complex, specialized, and difficult to substitute.
This shift is accompanied by significant structural dependencies. In France, the vast majority of active pharmaceutical ingredients for biologics are produced abroad, alongside vulnerabilities related to equipment, consumables, and critical raw materials.
In times of crisis, these dependencies can lead to major tensions, with direct impacts on continuity of care.
Biomanufacturing thus becomes a key operational determinant of a health system’s ability to absorb shocks, requiring stronger coordination between public and private stakeholders.
In this context, France BioLead highlights the need to fully integrate biomanufacturing into crisis preparedness policies, adopt a comprehensive value chain approach, develop a shared vision of industrial capacities, and better align national and European strategies.
Securing biomanufacturing capabilities is therefore a critical condition for ensuring access to treatments and strengthening the long-term resilience of the health system.
