Biorce opens office in former AstraZeneca headquarters

Barcelona is one of the main hubs for life and health sciences. Data, reports, and the dynamism of the ecosystem confirm this. Now, all that leadership is reflected in a single operation in the office market: the space left vacant by AstraZeneca to continue growing from the Estel Building, has now become the office from which the startup Biorce will propel its accelerated growth.

Biorce's new offices, spanning about 2,000 square meters, overlook Diagonal Avenue from the building known as El Dau, next to Maria Cristina square. The office, owned by Colonial SFL, will provide space for Biorce's team, from its engineers to marketing, including customer service and product. While dozens of desks are finding their definitive place, team members are already working in spaces that include meeting rooms, relaxed corners, and even individual booths, as they show for the first time the newly opened office, with a very similar layout to the one AstraZeneca left behind when it moved.

Thus, a giant in the pharmaceutical field grows to accommodate the also giant steps of a startup that, in one year, has multiplied its workforce tenfold (in fact, analysts place it among the three fastest-growing companies, worldwide). In this office dance, the space left by Biorce will also serve to further enlarge the ecosystem: until now, it operated from the technological and impact entrepreneurship hub of Norrsken, in Barceloneta.

This chain effect illustrates the dynamism of an ecosystem from which Biorce is standing out with its AI platform to accelerate clinical trials — also as a recent winner of the 4YFN Award. On average, clinical trials take more than a decade and over 6 billion euros to bring a new drug to market; with Biorce's platform, the process is accelerated, shortening the timelines of the multiple processes involved in trials, and eliminating errors that occur in more than half of the cases, and which lead to further delays.

Biorce's own project was born from the experience of its current CEO, Pedro Coelho, and the loss of his father to melanoma. Years earlier, Coelho had founded a clinical trial management company (known as CROs) in London, which grew from zero to 23 employees in three months. "We started to grow more and more, until one day my father called me to tell me he had melanoma, and the roller coaster began." A few months later, he was given a prognosis of three months to live, and Coelho began searching until he found an experimental clinical trial in which he could participate. With the trial, his father lived ten more months, "but if he had started a few months earlier, he would have overcome the disease. And that's where Biorce was born." Coelho decided to sell his company and bet everything on accelerating trials, with one goal: to get drugs to patients sooner.

To achieve this goal, Coelho teamed up with Clara Bernardes, José Faria and Diogo Pisoeiro ---friends among themselves and all of Portuguese origin--- and launched Biorce in 2024. Now, the startup's AI platform, Aika, shortens trial times by approximately 30%, as Coelho explains from the United States, where Biorce has a new headquarters. And once Aika has all its functionalities up and running, at least 50% will be achieved. And how does it achieve this? Aika draws on more than a million published clinical trials, with data that allows avoiding errors and accelerating processes, as Pia Sarrió explains from the startup.

"Aika facilitates protocol design, feasibility studies, and even indicates the ideal places to conduct the study. The point is to find cumbersome processes and streamline them," Sarrió emphasizes. Thus, Aika allows shortening each of the phases: "If it normally takes about six months to design a protocol, with Aika it can take a week. It saves time, money, and errors."

To continue building its platform, Biorce focuses on both improving existing functionalities and launching new pieces that will further shorten the long processes of clinical trials. "We have identified the various processes that can be streamlined. We have the entire scope we want to tackle," Sarrió states.

With the aim of addressing these points, Biorce has been exponentially expanding its workforce. From the 12 people who were part of the team a year ago, it now exceeds 120, with 81 of them in Barcelona. Of these, half have joined in the last four months: in December, there were about 60 people. "In the last five weeks, we have grown by 25%," Sarrió details. The workforce, moreover, is more than diverse: it not only includes 33 nationalities, but 74% of the team is international. And in this team, 51% are women. For talent attraction, Barcelona and its appeal help; Biorce's purpose and impact on health also do, as Sarrió explains.

To maintain this growth rate, they needed to find more space (and quickly). Accelerating the multiplication of the workforce led Biorce to study several alternatives, and AstraZeneca's old office seemed tailor-made: with all the necessary facilities and recently renovated in this open-plan style, with workspaces, meeting rooms, and spaces also for relaxation —as evidenced by a ping pong table and a foosball table—.

Growing in Europe, and in the United States

All of this to continue leading a race in which Biorce is the only company working to offer a solution that covers all processes of clinical trials. "There are competitors, but they focus on one part of the processes, they are not 360," Sarrió points out. Thus, Biorce will continue working to lead this acceleration of trials, always with one purpose: that drugs benefit patients as soon as possible.