A Biotech Blind Spot: If Both Eyes are on the Competition, None are at Home
The United States’ current approach to biotechnology investment and innovation is fragmented and focused on competing with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) thereby relegating biotechnology’s contributions to biodefense, bioeconomic growth, and healthcare, and public health to secondary importance. Securing long-term competitiveness requires creating and implementing a national strategy for biotechnology that focuses on its civilian applications.
The State of Competition with the PRC
The PRC has made progress in cultivating its domestic bioeconomy and biotechnology innovation.
Since 2010, the PRC has employed a top-down, state-centric investment and industrialization approach to biotechnology. In the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021 – 2025), the CCP designated biotechnology as a Strategic Emerging Technology with similar priority as AI and quantum computing. Provincial and local governments published their own strategies and policies in alignment. The PRC constructed “biotechnology parks”— campuses designed to attract and bundle biotechnology companies to benefit from infrastructure, concentrated talent pools, and business support. A report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (U.S.-China ESRC) concluded that these investments have helped attract and retain research talent. As of 2025, PRC universities and academic labs employed an estimated 30% of top academic biotechnology talent. This has fueled the PRC’s rise as the leading producer of biotechnology publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The research talent has enabled the successful development of Chinese biotech companies, attracting foreign investment from Europe and the United States.
The PRC’s biotechnology investments place U.S. companies at a market disadvantage, weakening the bioeconomic industrial base, increasing dependence and associated vulnerabilities. A 2019 Congressional hearing of the U.S.-China ESRC outlined risks associated with growing reliance on the PRC’s biotechnology and bioeconomy. The PRC is the largest global source of generic drugs, raw inputs for pharmaceuticals, and related health products. In a worst-case scenario, the PRC could sever medication supplies, crippling U.S. health infrastructure, or introduce contaminated, potentially lethal, medications into the drug supply. Even without escalation, Beijing has leverage over U.S. consumers.
Amid the PRC’s biotechnology advantage, U.S. policymakers and politicians gravitate towards a competition-oriented approach. A PRC-centric framework is useful for galvanizing bipartisan support in a polarized U.S. political climate. Characterizing legislation as intended to counter the PRC is a common tactic to secure necessary bipartisan support, as was the case with the CHIPS and Science Act for reshoring the semiconductor supply chain to compete with the PRC. Indeed, in the span of one week in 2024, the House of Representatives passed 25 bills aimed at countering threats from the CCP. Bipartisan support also enabled the House to pass the BIOSECURE Act banning federal contracts for companies using Chinese biotechnology.
Analyzing the PRC-Centric Approach
While the PRC-centric approach to biotechnology has its benefits, biotechnology investment should not be framed purely as a form of strategic competition. The current approach has generated a reactive and fragmented posture while overemphasizing defense applications, undervaluing civilian applications, and risking long-term political fragility.
Federal activities in the United States related to biotechnology and the broader bioeconomy have been smaller-scale, less centralized, and inadequately resourced. As early as 2010, the White House’s budget considered bioeconomy-related research and development (R&D) as a science and technology priority. Successive strategies, including the 2012 National Bioeconomy Blueprint and 2015 Strategy for American Innovation, identified biotechnology as central to economic growth and offered recommendations to improve innovation. However, both lacked specifics and funding, resulting in inconsistent implementation. Other efforts, like the Biden’s administration’s E.O. 14081, attempted to shift focus towards biotechnology and the bioeconomy, but lacked any legislative permanence and were quickly overturned by the Trump administration. While there have been follow-on efforts, this policy fragmentation and inconsistency have ultimately left the United States facing risks of losing its leadership position, according to the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB).
In addition to fragmentation and inconsistent implementation, existing efforts risk focusing too much on biotechnology’s defense applications. While valuable and worthwhile, these efforts must be balanced with civilian applications. The NSCEB’s final report emphasizes the PRC threat and biotechnology’s potential to revolutionize battlefield surveillance, military logistics, and operational capabilities via stealth and mobility. The resulting recommendations range from scaling biotechnology across forces to preventing adversaries from using or developing biotechnologies that threaten U.S. and allied security. While these priorities are legitimate, they focus political incentives towards defense-related investments and sideline civilian applications.
The above approaches fail to articulate the benefits of biotechnology investment to the public, risking losing public support. The PRC-competition frame spurred immediate bipartisan legislation, but its durability depends on visible economic benefits. The CHIPS Act’s broad economic benefits to voters has contributed to the Act’s endurance and prompted congressional members to defend it. Even legislation that did not receive bipartisan support, like the Inflation Reduction Act, has garnered more bipartisan support after legislators observed the economic benefits. Recent voter polls indicate that the economy remains a consistent top concern. Economic motives may be more salient for voters than PRC competition, as a 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that fewer U.S. adults had an unfavorable opinion of the PRC for the first time since 2022. Together, this evidence suggests that long-term political support of industrial or technological policy requires articulating clear economic incentives and more salient priorities for everyday Americans than great power competition.
Biotechnology’s Civilian Applications
If supported and scaled across its civilian applications, biotechnology has the potential to fuel economic growth, strengthen biodefense, and transform healthcare: all critical components to building the strategic resilience for long-term competitiveness.
Bioeconomy: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) defines bioeconomy as all “economic activity that is driven by research and innovation in the life sciences and biotechnology.” NASEM estimated that the U.S. bioeconomy accounted for more than 5% of the 2016 gross domestic product, about $960 billion. The global bioeconomy is projected to grow to more than $30 trillion over the next twenty years. Supporting civilian biotechnology innovation is critical to ensuring continued economic growth in the coming decades.
Biodefense: Biotechnology can contribute to biodefense and pandemic preparedness. Effective biodefense requires pathogen-agnostic capabilities focused on enhancing threat detection, surveillance, and countermeasures. Novel genetic sequencing techniques enable low-cost, portable, user-friendly sequencing methods for detecting and understanding pathogens. This is a direct input into the design and manufacturing of medical countermeasures. Furthermore, multiplex molecular panels allow providers to test for many pathogens using a single sample with speed and accuracy, supporting infectious disease detection and monitoring.
Healthcare: Genetic therapies based on clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) editing techniques are being used to treat diseases, ranging from sickle cell disease to cardiovascular disease. McKinsey & Company estimates that if the potential is fully realized, current biotechnology could reduce global disease burden by 45%, equivalent to adding between $500 billion to $1.3 trillion to the global economy in the next two decades. Within the United States, biotechnology can ease ever-growing healthcare costs.
Environment & Public Health: Biotechnology can also help solve public health issues, like per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS are persistent chemicals found in water, air, and soil that are linked to health effects, such as cancer and pregnancy complications. As existing decontamination methods remain difficult and expensive, biotechnology can create microbes that can be used to biodegrade PFAS.
A More Holistic Approach to Biotechnology
To capitalize on biotechnology’s civilian applications and secure long-term support for investment in the industry, U.S. policymakers must approach biotechnology from a more holistic perspective. A refined biotechnology approach will build on prior proposals’ strengths while further emphasizing pandemic preparedness, domestic bioeconomy development, and protecting and strengthening the industrial base.
A National Strategy for Biotechnology: The Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Commerce, should create a National Strategy for Biotechnology (NSB) within the next two to three years. The National Strategy would redefine the purpose of biotechnology policy to balance PRC competition and civilian applications intended to build strategic resiliency. The strategy would set agency priorities with the guiding principle being to harness comparative advantages in research talent and government-supported private-sector innovation. To promote transparency to external stakeholders (e.g., the public, private industry, and legislators), the strategy would establish clear timelines and ambitious, quantifiable goals for each agency.
A National Biotechnology Coordination Office: To operationalize the vision laid out by the NSB, Congress should pass legislation to establish a National Biotechnology Coordination Office (NBCO). The office would coordinate interagency efforts supporting biotechnology R&D targeted across the breadth of civilian applications as previously highlighted. It would also streamline policy across executive agencies and improve communication and coordination with the private sector and academia. To sustain the strategy’s long-term implementation, Congress should consider providing multi-year funding for the NBCO to minimize the risk of executive turnover.
Bioeconomic innovation and the industrial base: Congress should direct federal agencies to protect and strengthen the bioeconomic innovation and industrial base. The Office of Management and Budget should prepare a cross-cutting budget for coordinated long-term funding. Additional mechanisms include directing regulatory agencies to reduce regulatory barriers, expanding visas to attract foreign researchers, and empowering existing programs, such as the Small Business Innovation Research Program, to support small and medium-sized biotechnology companies and start-ups.
The PRC-centric approach to biotechnology is useful but incomplete and inadequate for cultivating the United States’ long-term capacity and competitiveness in the field. Biotechnology is not only a foreign policy asset but a central pillar of domestic health, economic growth, and pandemic preparedness. Policymakers should supplement the prevailing PRC-centric approach with a more nuanced approach that understands biotechnology’s civilian and economic benefits. The first step is to develop and implement a national strategy for biotechnology to guide a whole-of-government effort to harness biotechnology’s full potential.
Views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the views of GSSR, Georgetown University, or any other entity. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
