U.S. risks ceding biotech to China, commission warns

National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology calls for bolstering U.S. industry, slowing China’s progress

The U.S. will cede its preeminence in biotechnology to China within three years unless the government acts urgently, an independent commission chartered by Congress warns.

The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology came to this conclusion in an April 2025 report that was completed last year — before the Trump administration froze billions of dollars in biomedical research funding to elite universities, decimated NIH’s intramural research program, pushed a quarter of FDA’s staff out of government and threatened to impose tariffs on imports of pharmaceuticals and active pharmaceutical ingredients.

“Our window to act is closing,” the commission stated. “We need a two-track strategy: make America innovate faster, and slow China down.”

Commission Chairman Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) has introduced legislation, the National Biotechnology Initiative Act of 2025 (S. 1387), designed to implement key recommendations, particularly establishing coordinated federal leadership to advance U.S. biotechnology. It isn’t clear how the approach meshes with moves President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk have taken to shrink and restructure the federal government.

More than its specific recommendations, the commission’s most important impact could be to alert Congress and the Trump administration to the essential role of the life sciences in ensuring the prosperity and security of the U.S.

The commission’s report and continuing activities are “about getting biotech on the national stage and making sure that it’s critical and clear to policymakers just how important biotechnology is,” the commission’s vice chair, Michelle Rozo, told The BioCentury Show.

Rozo is a vice president at In-Q-Tel, a non-profit investor that supports the national security community.

The commission calls for the establishment of a National Biotechnology Coordination Office in the Executive Office of the President to coordinate a range of activities across the U.S. government.

The commission’s principal recommendation to Congress is appropriation of at least $15 billion over five years that is intended to “unleash more private capital into our national biotechnology sector.”

The money would provide about $1 billion to create an Independence Investment Fund to “invest in technology startups that strengthen U.S. national and economic security.” The fund “would operate outside of the government in a VC-like fashion, with a non-governmental manager,” Rozo told BioCentury. “We recommend fencing off a portion of this fund for biotechnology, but we do not think it needs to be specific to biotechnology.”

The $15 billion would also pay for initiatives at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create a hub for biotechnology, biometrology, and biological data standards, as well as grand challenge research programs to advance biomanufacturing and make biotechnology “predictably engineerable.”

The report calls for funding precommercial pilot biomanufacturing plants, along with educational programs to train workers for jobs in biotechnology.

A stark warning

The commission’s report portrays China as a malevolent force that is determined to “strangle” the U.S. biotech industry, “weaponize biotechnology,” and attempt to create “genetically enhanced PLA super-soldiers with fused human and artificial intelligence.”

The premise that China is weaponizing science leads the commission to treat biotechnology as a zero-sum game and to couple recommendations for bolstering U.S. competitiveness with calls to slow China’s progress.

To illustrate the threat it believes China poses to the U.S., the report asks readers to envision a “not-so-distant future where researchers in Shanghai develop a breakthrough drug that can eliminate malignant cells, effectively ending cancer as we know it. But when tensions over Taiwan reach a breaking point, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the strategic apparatus of the Chinese government, hoards the treatment under the guise of national security, cutting off supply to the United States.” In this scenario, the commission suggests, the media and streets could “overflow with people demanding that the United States abandon Taiwan.”

Keeping America safe, the commission asserts, requires decoupling U.S. and Chinese life sciences, including by severing of business and academic ties.

“China does not have a right to American research—period,” the commission’s report states.

Last year, Rozo and other commissioners endorsed the Biosecure Act, legislation that sought to restrict the ability of companies that contract with Wuxi Apptec Co. Ltd. (Shanghai:603259; HKEX:2359), Wuxi Biologics Inc. (HKEX:2269) and other contract development, manufacturing and research organizations to enter into contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services or the Department of Defense.

Biosecure did not pass in the 118th Congress and it has not been reintroduced. The report calls for Congress to enact legislation similar to the Biosecure Act to “ensure that U.S. capital does not support Chinese development of certain biotechnologies that could pose a national security risk.”