The concept of science-based technology was developed a long time ago in the economics of innovation (such as in the works of Pavitt or Freeman, just to mention two of the most important authors). This concept was forged to account for the evolution of a group of industries born in the last decades of the 19th century and which after World War II went through a number of major changes. As Nelson (1996) pointed out ‘‘The rise of chemistry, physics, and biology as strong fundamental sciences during the last decade of the nineteenth century was accompanied by several developments that changed the nature of industrial technical innovation.‘‘ The development of so-called ‘‘new technologies‘‘ since the 1970s, and in particular information technology and biotechnology, has encouraged renewed interest in better understanding the links between science, technology and economic organization. Today, it is clear that the conditions for the development of science-based sectors are of paramount importance to the overall economic development and competitiveness of nations, because these sectors are the site of major structural transformations. The literature on technological regimes however, shows that the sectors usually characterized as science-based can exhibit quite diverse configurations. It is thus useful to enter into the ‘‘black box‘‘ of science-based models, to try to better understand the nature of the dynamics of such technological regimes in their various forms. Our purpose here is to explore this question by considering the biotech industry, concentrating on the institutional dimensions which, in our view, play a major role in the structuring of technological regimes and modes of organization. After a short review of the literature on science-based sectors and technological regimes, we focus on some specificities of the emerging biotech sector, aiming to show how and why it can be regarded as a new type of science-based technological regime, referred to in this paper as the science-based ‘‘type 2‘‘ model. In a short concluding section, we explore some of the consequences of this basic distinction between two types of ‘‘science-based‘‘ regimes.