The European Investment Bank is lending €20 million to BioLamina, the Swedish biotech that supplies the laminin-based cell culture matrices used by stem cell therapy developers worldwide. The funding will support expanded production of laminin technologies and animal-free drug safety testing methods.
BioLamina, the Stockholm-based biotechnology company that produces the protein scaffolding used to grow stem cells for therapeutic applications, has secured a €20 million loan from the European Investment Bank.
The funding will be used to expand BioLamina’s development of laminin technologies enabling next-generation cell therapies and more advanced, animal-free methods for drug safety testing, according to the EIB’s Stockholm office.
BioLamina sits at an enabling layer of the cell therapy ecosystem: rather than developing therapies directly, it produces the extracellular matrix proteins that allow researchers and companies to grow, expand, and differentiate stem cells reliably outside the body.
Its core product line, Biolaminin®, consists of full-length human recombinant laminin proteins, the same proteins that cells encounter in their natural tissue environment.
Laminins are key structural components of the basement membrane, the protein layer beneath epithelial and endothelial cells, and they trigger cell-type-specific responses including adhesion, survival, differentiation, and organisation.
Most commercial alternatives use truncated or non-human versions of these proteins; BioLamina’s claim is that full-length human laminins provide more biologically faithful conditions and therefore more consistent, reproducible, and clinically compliant cell products.
The therapeutic applications for cells grown on laminin matrices are broad. Cell therapies can potentially be used to treat type 1 diabetes, by generating insulin-producing beta cells, Parkinson’s disease, heart failure, acute liver failure, and cancer, among other conditions that are currently difficult to treat or have no cure.
BioLamina has collaborated with Novo Nordisk on stem cell therapies for diabetes and has a partnership with Cell X Technologies for iPSC-based therapeutic manufacturing workflows.
Founded in 2008 on research from Dr Karl Tryggvason’s laboratory at the Karolinska Institutet and Duke-NUS Medical School, BioLamina is headquartered in Sundbyberg in Greater Stockholm and employs approximately 100 to 117 people according to different sources.
Its principal shareholders include Swedish investment company Bure Equity AB (via Bure Growth), Lauxera Capital Partners, the Tryggvason family, and Northislet. The company raised €19 million in equity financing in July 2024, led by Lauxera Capital Partners.
The €20 million EIB loan is the company’s first disclosed debt financing and sits within the EIB’s broader BioTechEU mandate, announced in December 2025, to mobilise €10 billion in biotech investment across 2026–27.
CEO Klaus Langhoff-Roos has described BioLamina’s mission as proving that “full-length equals full-function”, a formulation that extends to the company’s drug safety testing products, which provide animal-free alternatives to the animal-derived extracellular matrices that have historically been used in toxicology screening.
The EIB loan will support both arms of the business.
