{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/young-column-how-america-can-win-the-biotech-race/", "YOUNG COLUMN: How America Can Win the Biotech Race", "2025-10-15", "2025", "2025-10", "Republican", "Senate", "IN", "Todd Young", "Y000064", "www.young.senate.gov", "toddyoung", "https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/", "scraper", "The following column by U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) was published in Foreign Affairs on October 15, 2025\n\nBy Todd Young\n\nIn September 2024, Akeso, a little-known Chinese biopharmaceutical company, announced that clinical trials had shown that its new drug could halt the progression of a type of lung cancer for nearly a full year. These results sent shock waves through the pharmaceutical industry: the previous best-in-class drug, produced by the U.S. pharmaceutical giant Merck, delayed new tumor growth for only six months.\n\nSpurred by breakthroughs like this, China is becoming a world-leading biotechnology innovator. Western biopharmaceutical companies are clamoring to ink deals with their Chinese counterparts. Over the last five years, the number of agreements struck by Chinese companies producing cancer drugs to license their intellectual property has more than doubled. The total market capitalization of China\u2019s publicly listed biotech firms has reached $1.5 trillion, second only to that of the United States.\n\nAs China surges, many traditional American strengths have atrophied. The United States lacks a targeted federal strategy for biotechnology, and its policymaking is fragmented and uncoordinated. Federal research funding has stagnated, while skittish investors are avoiding cutting-edge projects. Regulatory burdens slow down innovators who want to go from lab to market. And the United States\u2019 research infrastructure, biological data reserves, and workforce development pipeline are not just faltering\u2014they are being left in the dust by Beijing.\n\nThe United States cannot, and should not, try to beat China by being more like China, which relies on subsidizing handpicked firms. Instead, the United States should lean into its existing advantages, especially its private sector. By proactively remedying market failures, the federal government can help unleash private-sector capital to fuel the country\u2019s world-class biotechnology industry. If the United States successfully reasserts its biotech leadership, it can ensure that the new technology makes everyone safer, healthier, and more secure. But if the United States remains passive, China will shape how biotechnology develops, threatening not only U.S. dominance in this vital sector but also its national security.\n\nTHE NEW BIOTECH ERA\n\nChina is gaining ground in biotechnology just as the field is entering a fundamentally new age. Thanks to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, engineering, and automation, researchers can now model extraordinarily complex biological systems without needing to fully understand how those systems work. In 2021, for instance, researchers from Google\u2019s AI lab, DeepMind, solved the previously impossible challenge of understanding and predicting how proteins fold. Before AI, enumerating all possible shapes of a single protein would have taken longer than the age of the known universe. DeepMind\u2019s AlphaFold system, in contrast, can accurately predict the shape of a protein in minutes.\n\nHumans are now on the cusp of understanding and programming cells as easily as they program computers. AI models are learning how to become fluent in the language of DNA, just as they can communicate easily in English or Mandarin. Technology is also democratizing biotechnology, in much the way that personal computers became more affordable in the 1990s. The cost of sequencing a human genome, for example, has dropped from hundreds of millions of dollars in the early 2000s to hundreds of dollars today.\n\nAs biotechnology becomes more accessible, its applications are multiplying by the day. Noninvasive genetic testing has existed for decades; breakthroughs in genomics are now transforming how doctors treat previously incurable diseases. In 2023, for example, researchers developed the first FDA-approved gene therapy based on CRISPR-Cas9 technology, using a patient\u2019s own edited stem cells to treat sickle cell disease. Research labs are deploying AI to further develop these biotechnologies, which could lead to new treatments and medicine for a range of life-threatening diseases.\n\nTHE BIOTECH BATTLEFIELD\n\nEmerging biotechnology has major ramifications for national security and geopolitical competition. It has the potential to reshape every strategic sector, including defense, agriculture, energy, and manufacturing. In the realm of the military, biotechnology could allow countries to reshore the production of chemicals used in munitions. Soldiers could synthesize food, medication, and other battlefield essentials on the frontlines by using technologies that fit inside a backpack.\n\nManufacturers could also use custom-designed proteins to separate critical minerals from waste in the mining process, which could lower the costs of extracting such minerals, increase their production, and reduce dependence on unreliable supply chain partners. Farmers could grow drought- and pest-resistant crops. Biotechnology could even change the future of computing power by replacing silicon-based storage hardware with a synthetic, biological alternative that could hold significantly more data in less space.\n\nThese innovations could help a country thrive\u2014or be used to hurt a rival. A military could exploit human enhancements to outmaneuver and overwhelm an adversary. Modified pathogens could be developed and unleashed into an enemy\u2019s agricultural system, wiping out farmers\u2019 livelihoods and causing prices at the grocery store to skyrocket. And adversaries could weaponize dependencies on pharmaceuticals to disrupt a country\u2019s supplies of vital medications.\n\nThe country that leads global biotechnology will determine how and to what ends this transformative technology is used. For most of the twentieth century, the United States dominated the field. In the 1940s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in partnership with the private sector, discovered and mass-produced new strains of penicillin. In the 1970s, American biochemists discovered how to cut and splice DNA fragments, paving the way for the development of synthetic medicines. In the 1990s, the United States led the effort to sequence the full human genome for the first time. To this day, the United States has more biotechnology patents, companies, and Nobel Prize winners than any other country.\n\nCHINA\u2019S CHAMPIONS\n\nBut China is swiftly closing the gap. For nearly 20 years, China has made biotechnology a strategic priority, implementing a comprehensive package of financing, subsidies, and diplomatic support for its domestic industry. In 2020, Chinese leader Xi Jinping stressed the need to incorporate biosecurity into the country\u2019s national security system, pushing for more independent scientific innovation so that China would not need to depend on the United States.\n\nBoth the Chinese Communist Party and the army have taken Xi\u2019s charge to heart. They have launched a so-called whole-of-nation effort\u2014centralizing control of science and technology efforts and leveraging all available state resources at their disposal\u2014to develop cutting-edge biotechnologies to advance their military and economic objectives. Beijing is investing heavily in gene editing, bionic robots, human-machine teaming (that is, collaboration between humans and machines), and biomanufacturing. It has collapsed the barriers between civilian and defense research so that ostensibly private Chinese companies, such as the biotechnology giant BGI Group, serve the CCP\u2019s military and technology research goals. It is no coincidence that BGI also manages the China National GeneBank, which stores genetic data and biological samples.\n\nBeijing has turned to a familiar playbook to promote its biotech goals. It lavishes subsidies on its chosen champions and helps them acquire U.S. companies that are developing promising technologies. In 2013, for instance, BGI purchased the U.S.-based company Complete Genomics, which made BGI the world leader in genetic sequencing. Market dominance and scale make it possible for BGI to box out promising U.S. startups. The Chinese company WuXi AppTec\u2014whose market share in biotech mirrors Huawei\u2019s commanding position in telecommunications\u2014has gobbled up U.S. firms to gain access to their intellectual property. Today, the vast majority of U.S. biopharmaceutical companies depend on WuXi and similar Chinese firms for everything from drug discovery research services to manufacturing of finished pharmaceuticals.\n\nThe Chinese government supports biotech with investments in both physical and human capital. Beijing has built and funded over 100 world-class biotechnology parks with state-of-the-art lab space for companies. China\u2019s state-owned enterprises are investing in biotech firms, and several have begun making acquisitions to expand overseas. Authorities have also urged venture capital firms to fund biotech ventures and companies. And an increasing number of Chinese students trained abroad are returning home, bolstering China\u2019s rising competitiveness in the global race for scientific talent.\n\nCAUSE FOR CONCERN\n\nBeijing\u2019s strategy is working. From 2016 to 2021, the market value of Chinese biotech firms grew 100-fold to $300 billion. By 2023, China\u2019s investment in biopharmaceutical research and development had soared to $15 billion, from $35 million in 2015. From January to July 2025, the Hang Seng Biotech Index, which tracks the top 30 biotechnology, medical device, and pharmaceutical companies listed in Hong Kong, rose more than 60 percent, far outpacing the three percent gain in the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index over the same time frame.\n\nChina\u2019s dominance goes beyond market gains. In 2024, China surpassed the United States in world-class cancer research output, as measured by the Nature index of top journals in science and health. In synthetic biology, too, China has upstaged the United States as the top source of research. In 2010, researchers based in the United States published 45 percent of the most-cited research papers in the field, while those in China accounted for 13 percent. In 2023, researchers in China published 60 percent, while their U.S. counterparts produced only seven percent.\n\nBeijing\u2019s biotech strategy is working.\n\nChina has now surpassed the United States in drug clinical trials, registering more than 7,100 in 2024, to the United States\u2019 6,000. Offering government-backed scale and low prices, the global share of China\u2019s pharmaceutical output quadrupled from 2002 to 2019. U.S. and foreign drug manufacturers are increasingly dependent on Chinese sources for the raw materials and intermediate inputs for active pharmaceutical ingredients, and on fully Chinese-made active ingredients, as well.\n\nBeijing\u2019s biotechnology success is both an impressive achievement and a cause for deep concern for the United States and its partners. China\u2019s biotech industry operates with fewer ethical guardrails, which could cause irreversible damage. In 2018, a Chinese biophysicist used the CRISPR-Cas9 technology to edit the genomes of human embryos, which broke global norms and opened up a Pandora\u2019s box of unknown consequences. The scientist was fired and sentenced to three years in prison, but he is already back in the lab. Yet rogue scientists are not the only abusers of biotechnology. Journalists have documented how Chinese authorities are methodically collecting genomic data on millions of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group, and using it to support a campaign of mass repression that the United States government has formally designated as genocide.\n\nIn 2021, Reuters revealed that a commercially available prenatal test developed by BGI that had been used by more than eight million women across at least 52 countries had been created in partnership with researchers connected to the Chinese military. BGI has worked closely with the People\u2019s Liberation Army and its affiliated medical universities on multiple other projects, including research that could have implications for improving the battlefield performance of Chinese soldiers. The CCP has given the world few reasons to trust that its biotechnology ambitions are benevolent.\n\nASLEEP AT THE WHEEL\n\nThe U.S. biotech industry is poised to grow, but it needs private capital to get off the sidelines and fuel the next wave of breakthroughs. While China provides its leading companies with cheap capital through government subsidies and investments, America\u2019s strong private markets remain its core advantage. The U.S. government needs to empower those markets to do their job by addressing the obstacles biotechnology companies face in scaling up innovations: complex regulations, underutilized capital, and insufficient protections against dangers such as intellectual property theft.\n\nSince its creation in 2022, the bipartisan National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, on which I serve as chairman, has searched for ways to advance U.S. leadership in biotechnology. Most important, the United States needs a private-public partnership to develop the domestic biotechnology industry so it can reach its full potential. Such an alliance would remedy the market failures that inhibit American innovators, investors, and entrepreneurs from achieving breakthroughs in the field. Supply-side actions such as research prizes and infrastructure investments can accelerate R & D, while targeted demand-side policies can reduce financial risks and regulatory bottlenecks and make the U.S. government a better customer for biotechnology products.\n\nThis spring, I helped introduce the bipartisan National Biotechnology Initiative Act of 2025, which would enshrine some of the commission\u2019s recommendations in federal law, including streamlining biotech regulations and establishing an office to coordinate national biotechnology strategy. I am also working with my colleagues to advance legislation to create an Independence Investment Fund that would invest in technology startups that strengthen U.S. national and economic security; authorize and finance a network of manufacturing facilities across the United States to scale up bioindustrial products before they are fully commercially viable; make investments to improve the effectiveness and reach of the popular Small Business Innovation Research/Technology Transfer program to support early-stage innovation; and use advance market commitments\u2014promises to buy biotechnology products if they are successfully produced\u2014and purchase agreements to smooth out unpredictable or inconsistent demand, among many other policies.\n\nA TEAM EFFORT\n\nIf the United States is to reassert its global biotechnology leadership and shape a secure, safe, and ethical biotechnology future, the U.S. government must work with allies. The United States and its likeminded partners must set the standards for how biotechnology is developed and used rather than wait for China to build a system that allows unethical gene editing and biotech-powered mass surveillance and repression.\n\nThe United States must show the world that Beijing\u2019s tactics are not aimed at mutually beneficial international partnerships, but at global biotechnological control. That pursuit of dominance will not be limited to overtaking the United States; the CCP\u2019s strategy is to use its growing biotech dominance as economic and geopolitical leverage around the world.\n\nWhereas the Chinese party leadership appears to view other countries\u2019 bioeconomies as threats to be contained, the United States should view them as opportunities to secure and expand a shared biotechnological future. As with defense and economic alliances, the United States must work with partners to foster a collective security outlook that standardizes the approach to biotechnology protection. Specifically, the United States and its allies need to establish a unified approach to data security, export controls, and whether and how to accept investment from adversaries. Reciprocal biological data-sharing agreements would both advance collaborative research and implement and enforce secure, fair, and transparent data standards\u2014especially when China has built its own large biodata repository, as its government has done in collaboration with BGI.\n\nThe United States must set the standards for how biotechnology is developed.\n\nAdvancing biotechnology also requires the United States to identify allies and partners that have complementary goals, capabilities, and expertise. Nearly every country has something valuable to offer, whether advanced manufacturing capabilities, computational biology prowess, or biobased chemicals and advanced therapeutics. Today, the State Department\u2019s International Technology Security and Innovation Fund, which finances partnerships to improve global supply chains, does not cover biotechnology; that must be remedied immediately. The Trump administration should also expand its diplomatic efforts to promote American biotechnology, reaching out to partners to expand market access and boost aggregate demand for U.S. biotechnology products.\n\nThe United States has learned the lesson of technological complacency before\u2014and paid dearly for it. Semiconductors, much like biotechnology, were an American invention, first soldered together in garages in Palo Alto. For years, however, China moved aggressively to close the gap. In 2022, Congress passed the landmark CHIPS and Science Act, which aimed to spur the production of semiconductors on U.S. and allied soil and to use export controls to prevent the most advanced semiconductor technology from getting into adversaries\u2019 hands. This policy is succeeding. The United States is again becoming the leading global hub for advanced chip manufacturing, while its restrictions on adversaries\u2019 access to semiconductors have set back China\u2019s chip-making.\n\nThe United States can win the biotechnology race. By harnessing two of the United States\u2019 greatest strengths\u2014its dynamic private sector and its unmatched network of allies and partners across the world\u2014Congress and the Trump administration can ensure that the United States, not China, leads the biotechnology age. Strategic action now is the difference between controlling the biotechnology future or being controlled by it.", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T19:32:54Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.young.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/young-column-how-america-can-win-the-biotech-race/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.641285140067339, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}