In Nantes, a future health district with European ambitions

On the Island of Nantes, dotted with construction sites and brand new residential buildings, the future hospital center is gradually emerging from the ground in the heart of an 11-hectare crane field.

The new CHU - 13 buildings over 220.000 square meters, planned for 2027 - will be at the heart of the future "health district", designed as an "ecosystem" where doctors, researchers and entrepreneurs will come together.

The new health faculty is due to move within six years a few hundred meters away, also very close to the research institute co-financed by the metropolis, the region, the State and European funds.

Another neighboring project: that of “Station S”, a future breeding ground for innovative companies in the health sector, whose buildings must be delivered in 2025 and 2029.

“It is a district where we will develop answers at the cutting edge of research, which we will then be able to offer to as many people as possible. Not only on a national scale but on a European scale,” defends Johanna Rolland , PS mayor of Nantes.

This vast project, costed at 1,5 billion euros, "positions Nantes at the top of the largest current European investments in the service of health", according to the mayor.

Additional cost

The largest hospital under construction in Europe, the future CHU alone represents an investment of more than 1,2 billion euros, a third of which is subsidized by the State and the ARS.

The government had made it one of the symbols of “reinvestment” in the French health system after the health crisis.

But the laying of its first stone at the beginning of 2022 has not silenced the critical voices, who have for years been pointing out a poorly chosen location and a “staggering” cost which has continued to rise.

“We are not planning for the health of tomorrow: for example, while we are moving towards more and more outpatient care, we are positioning a university hospital on an island whose access is by nature complicated,” laments Laurence Garnier , LR senator from Loire-Atlantique.

Presented under the mayoral mandate of Jean-Marc Ayrault, the new CHU project was originally supposed to cost “300 million euros”, she says.

In the spring, the regional audit chamber estimated, following a flash audit carried out at the end of 2022, that inflation would generate a new additional cost of at least 55 million euros.

"Growth"

Opposite, the metropolis defends an investment which will contribute to the “national effort of reindustrialization and health sovereignty”, providing jobs and synonymous with attractiveness.

The health sector can become "a major sector of the territory", like "aeronautics or the naval industry", maintains the president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Yann Trichard.

“Health in France has long been placed in two boxes: the compassionate box and the deficit box. But it is also a source of considerable growth,” says Philippe El Saïr, director of the hospital.

The future district also has laboratories already installed in Nantes, such as OSE Immunotherapeutics, whose premises are located a few hundred meters from the CHU construction site.

This laboratory presented in mid-September the positive results of its therapeutic vaccine against the lung vaccine, which demonstrate a reduction in the risk of death compared to chemotherapy, in patients with advanced diseases.

“This district will create an environment where we can exchange easily. Major projects arise from discussions between doctors, researchers and entrepreneurs. But for that, obviously, they need to work alongside each other,” says the laboratory’s general director, Nicolas Poirier.

He expects to see “all kinds of talented researchers” arriving in Nantes by 2030.