We Build Our Way to Security: What Washington Heard at the China Biotech Debate
At last week's China Biotech Debate, regulators, investors, and national security veterans kept arriving at that same conclusion from very different starting points. America protects its medicine supply by growing stronger and extending that strength through allies.
The surest protection for America's medicines is a stronger America, and the most useful thing about the China Biotech Debate in Washington was how many people reached that answer on their own. On September 15, ABI and Endpoints News brought senior FDA officials, a former FBI biological threats investigator, the head of the congressional biotechnology commission, biotech founders and investors, and the chairman of the House Select Committee on China together at Fathom Gallery. Our executive director, Jennifer Crook, joined the panel on what biosecurity risk actually means.
Jenn spent twenty-five years at the CIA, most recently in the China Mission Center, and she opened by describing how China sees the sector. Its government has treated biotechnology as a strategic national security industry for thirty years, while Americans have come to assume medicine will always be on the shelf. "We take it for granted," she told the room. The distance between those two habits of mind is what ABI exists to close, and Jenn was precise about the direction the fix has to run.
"They are trying to make China weaker, which is not the same as trying to make the United States stronger. I think the former is about punishing, and the latter is about building."
Building, in her account, means restoring capacities the country let go over decades, attracting and keeping the best minds in the world, and deepening partnerships "that are irreplaceable, and China can't replicate." The goal is a country that no longer relies on "a single point of failure or a single adversary" for the materials and ingredients its hospitals need. She gave the room the test ABI applies to every proposal: "Does it make us stronger? Does it make us safer? If it doesn't do both, it's probably not about national security." That seriousness matters more for medicine than for any other emerging technology, she argued, because "at the end of the day, it's lives."
Her fellow panelists pressed toward the same place. Edward You, who spent two decades on biological threats at the FBI and in the intelligence community, called the contest "not an arms race; it's a space race," and warned that no one wins a space race by playing defense. He urged the room to widen its frame. "We tend to think it's us versus China," he said. "Don't forget that we’ve got partners too." He had just returned from meetings with research institutions from five Southeast Asian nations, and their question was where American leadership had gone. His answer: "Part of leading is just showing up." Caitlin Frazer, executive director of the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, put the principle in one line: "A strong biotech sector is a prepared biotech sector."
The FDA opened the evening by describing the kind of unrealized advantage that determines where medicines get developed. Karim Mikhail, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, framed the goal as making sure "those medicines are actually developed in the U.S. and will be available for American patients." The agency's new expedited IND pilot should cut roughly half the time sponsors spend preparing an initial filing, a stretch that now runs close to a year and sometimes as long as two and a half. Grace Graham, deputy commissioner for policy, legislation, and international affairs, explained why the work cannot wait for a crisis. If a medicine Americans depend on ever stopped shipping, she said, "the options for the policymakers at that point in time are way fewer than the options we have now." "The strategy has to be both streamlining what we do here, doing more of it here, as well as making sure there's no corners being cut."
The third panel showed what happens when that speed gap persists. David Li of Meliora Therapeutics and Patrick Malone of KdT Ventures described American startups hiding their targets even from their own investors, because a competitor abroad can reach proof of concept faster than a U.S. company can defend its head start. Both called the trend corrosive, and Malone traced it to its source in how quickly and cheaply work gets done here compared with overseas. Li named the edge worth building on: "The U.S. really needs emphasis on novelty because that is our true advantage in this competition." Secrecy buys a company time, and only capacity at home closes the gap that makes secrecy necessary.
Chairman John Moolenaar closed the program in conversation with Endpoints' Max Bayer on outbound investment and the reliability of clinical data generated abroad. The room disagreed on plenty across four sessions, as Endpoints intended. The through-line held anyway. Security in biotechnology comes from capacity: faster review at home, deeper partnerships abroad, and investment in the novel science where America leads.
Watch the full sessions