CAMBRIDGE — The increasingly adversarial relationship between the United States and China has raised national security concerns about Chinese penetration into key sectors of the US economy, such as technology, manufacturing, and clean energy.
Now, some in Congress are raising alarms about China’s threat to another vital industry: biotechnology.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers visited Massachusetts this week to call attention to that threat and call for strengthening US life sciences companies, protecting their technologies, and safeguarding Americans’ genetic data from a Chinese biotech industry with close ties to the authoritarian state.
China’s government has poured tens of billions of dollars into its biotech industry in recent years to close the gap in an innovation sector long dominated by American drug developers.
“Biotechnology is going to be a critical domain of competition between the US and China, and Massachusetts is the best player on the field in biotechnology,” said US Representative Jake Auchincloss, Democrat of Massachusetts. “The most important questions about whether we win have to do with America, not China: How do we invest in the life science ecosystem, its talent, and the biotech infrastructure?”
As with other industries, the relationship between China and US biotech companies is complex. They are both competitors and partners. Chinese suppliers, for example, have become increasingly integrated into the pharmaceutical supply chain, producing low-cost chemicals and other active ingredients used in prescription drugs.
At a biotech fair hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School, members of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party talked to local industry leaders about the complexities of doing business with China.
Some biotech entrepreneurs said their companies — still developing and testing drugs — are already manufacturing products in China or buying raw materials from Chinese contractors, business alliances that could be hurt by a rupture in already fragile US-China relations.
“China has clearly distinguished themselves in the biologics space,” said Raffi Afeyan, co-founder of Ampersand Biomedicines, a Dorchester startup that buys raw materials from China to help it develop targeted therapies that can be programmed to avoid toxic side effects. “They’re investing heavily in critical technologies.”
US dependence on China has increased since the COVID pandemic. Imports of Chinese pharmaceutical products grew from $2.1 billion to $10.3 billion between 2020 and 2022, according to a report last year by the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think thank.
While the visiting lawmakers were focused on national security, some biotech executives said their primary concern was a repeat of the supply interruptions that slowed drug production during the pandemic. Shipments were delayed for components for everything from hydrocortisone to treat skin conditions to tablets for high blood pressure.
During their visit here, lawmakers warned that China’s military maneuvers off the coast of Taiwan could be the precursor to an invasion that could trigger a wider war and shut down the supply pipeline.
“It’s not just a risk of missiles and bullets flying,” said Representative Mike Gallagher the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Select Committee. “It’s the risk of weaponizing supply chains. We are not thinking strategically enough about where do we have an unacceptable dependency on Chinese manufacturing.”
The lawmakers also echoed privacy jitters that have shadowed the Chinese technology companies, such as the telecommunications company Huawei and the social media app TikTok. They cautioned that Chinese biotech firms doing business with US companies could gain access to personal medical data of Americans.
A bill filed in the House last week, called the BioSecure Act, would ban Chinese biotech giant Beijing Genomics Institute, and companies using its technology, from federal contracts. The legislation is co-sponsored by Gallagher and the select committee’s senior Democrat, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois.
The bill’s sponsors said the company, known as BGI, has dozens of subsidiaries globally and collects personal genetic data from prenatal tests it developed in partnership with the Chinese government and People’s Liberation Army. The tests are taken by millions of pregnant women in China and other countries, though not in the US, giving BGI access to data that could be used to discriminate against ethnic minorities — or worse, the sponsors said.
“What the [Chinese Communist Party] has done is cultivate companies that have a profit motive but also do the CCP’s bidding,” Krishnamoorthi said. “BGI feeds data from those pregnancy tests back to the mother ship to then use for genetically identifying minorities and persecuting them.”
Representatives from the Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request to discuss the nation’s biotech push.
BGI said in a statement that its work “is undertaken for civilian and scientific purposes only.” The company said it “places the highest priority on privacy and respects human rights.” It warned the proposed House bill would restrict competition, “resulting in increased health care costs and limited access to technologies and services” for Americans.
China poses a unique challenge to policy makers because its companies are tightly intertwined with an authoritarian government, said Anna Puglisi, a former US national counterintelligence officer for East Asia.
“At its core,” said Puglisi, now a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, “it’s the challenge of a Chinese system that really blurs public and private, government and military, and creates an unfair playing field for US companies.”
But some US biotech companies also worry that a backlash against Chinese biotech could hurt important contractors with no apparent ties to the Chinese government. One is WuXi Biologics, which is building a 220,000-square-foot biomanufacturing plant on the site of the former state hospital in Worcester.
WuX Bio’s shares tumbled nearly 10 percent on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange after the House bill was introduced, even though the company was not cited as a target of the legislation. The company, spun out of a Chinese conglomerate and incorporated in the Cayman Islands, operates as an independent contract manufacturer of cell-based biologics, not gene therapies designed with personal genetic data.
“WuXi Biologics does not collect human genomic data,” Bill Aitchison, the company’s senior vice president and head of US operations, said in a statement. “We are proud to support the US and global health care industry, developing and manufacturing high-quality biologics that our clients use in their work to benefit patients.”
The growing tensions with China and the lessons of COVID are spurring biotech companies to shorten their supply chains. One company at the biotech fair, National Resilience of San Diego, is building a network of biomanufacturing plants, including two in Massachusetts, to produce drugs for US biopharma clients.
Its chief executive, Rahul Singhvi, who lives in Massachusetts, said the company is retrofitting a former Sanofi plant in Allston and another plant it acquired in Marlborough, using technology and processes that will make it cost-competitive with rival Chinese manufacturers.
“Our drugs are being produced in China when it makes a lot more sense to produce them here,” Singhvi said. “If you’re going to make your most important drugs in China, there’s a serious level of vulnerability.”
Another member of the select panel, Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, called for a comprehensive strategy to deter China from an attack on Taiwan or other aggressive actions that could lead to war and destabilize the US and global economies. He also cited the importance of protecting US personal genomic data.
“Biotech is one of those technologies that has serious national security implications,” he said. “It’s not too far in the future where biotechnology will be used to develop weapons. We know Beijing is trying to steal genetic information. We don’t know what exactly they want to do with it.”
Robert Weisman can be reached at robert.weisman@globe.com.