US bill targets Chinese biotechs

The United States is seeking to prevent four Chinese biotech companies from doing business in the country, citing them as “companies of concern” that threaten national security. The Biosecure Act, introduced in both the Senate (S.3558) in December and House of Representatives (H.R.7085) in January, would prohibit the federal government from contracting with certain biotech providers connected to foreign adversaries. The ban could extend to institutions that receive funding from the National Institutes of Health or other US government agencies, which would include almost all universities, research centers, hospitals and life science companies. The companies named in the bill are BGI Group, MGI Tech, Complete Genomics and WuXi AppTec — all Chinese-owned companies that provide instruments or services associated with the collection, sequencing or analysis of genetic information. The Senate bill’s sponsor and chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, Gary Peters (D-Mich.), said S.3558 was “critical legislation to strengthen our national security and combat risks posed by biotech companies from adversarial nations like China” and that “it is incredibly important that we advance this legislation quickly.” In a press release on H.R.7085, sponsor Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, said “The CCP will undoubtedly use the genetic data collected by BGI to further its malign aggression, potentially even to develop a bioweapon used to target the American people.” Rachel King, CEO of industry trade group the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, responded in a letter to the Senate committee that the legislation would hamper US innovation, saying it would “do untold damage to the drug development supply chain both for treatments currently approved and on market as well as for development pipelines decades in the making.”

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