BioAlps kept a testimonial series when the cluster turned twenty: not a brochure, a set of rooms speaking for themselves. We reread BioArk in January 2026, after Bioscibex — one of its houses — sent its first bioreactors out. The park is still doing what it said it would do.
From discovery to a named batch
BioArk Monthey and Visp are technological sites for life-sciences companies: offices, laboratories, cleanrooms, and the services of The Ark Foundation. Three platforms sit there for rapid diagnostic tests, and a biopharmaceutical cGMP facility. Valais already holds manufacturing names — Lonza, Siegfried, Bachem. BioArk’s claim is the launch pad beside them, so a project does not have to leave the canton to be made.
The sites were set in 2003 and 2004, in the same years BioAlps itself was being named. Six buildings, more than 20,000 square metres, some three hundred jobs. The archive sentence we keep: a cluster is not only discovery. It is the corridor in which discovery is allowed to become a batch.