On December 18, 2025, Donald Trump signed the BIOSECURE Act. All caps but it is not an acronym, as is usually the case by convention for American legislation. Perhaps a nod to Trump’s “shouting” in his social posts. Aside from that, the law — part of the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual military spending bill — prohibits American federal agencies from purchasing biotechnology equipment and services from Chinese companies considered national security risks. Genomics, DNA sequencing, contract research platforms: Congress has determined that certain Chinese-origin biotechnologies must not enter the American public supply chain.
The problem is that the BIOSECURE Act does not apply to private pharmaceutical companies. And they are the ones making the deals that matter.
In 2025, Western and Japanese pharmaceutical companies concluded 70 agreements with Chinese biotech firms, paying nearly $5.6 billion upfront for rights to molecules, according to the analysis firm Evaluate cited by an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. In the first months of 2026, 30 additional deals had already closed for nearly $1.9 billion. Pfizer paid $1.25 billion to the Chinese 3SBio for an oncology drug candidate. Gilead Sciences paid $120 million to Pregene Biopharma for CAR-T therapies. Sanofi invested $30 million in GluBio, a startup with 22 employees and labs between Shanghai and San Diego. According to McKinsey, China already accounts for 30% of the global pipeline of experimental drugs.
Washington has legislated against Chinese genomic service providers. The private market has already shifted capital toward the direct purchase of Chinese innovation. The two things do not contradict each other legally. They contradict each other in terms of strategic coherence.
THE TAXI OF GLOBALIZATION
To understand how we got here, it is worth starting from afar and reiterating what I have been pointing out for some time. China has used the open international trade system exactly like a taxi: it attracted foreign technology, accumulated skills along the entire value chain, and progressively replaced Western producers. In the pharmaceutical field, this process has been particularly methodical. China started with the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients — the so-called APIs, Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients — and basic raw materials, where costs were low and competition was almost entirely price-based. Then it moved up to finished drugs and finally to research.
Set aside for a moment the neoclassical economics textbooks: Chinese competitiveness at this stage does not derive from Ricardian comparative advantages but from pervasive state support. Subsidies on electricity, concessional loans from public banks, absent or unenforced environmental regulations for handling toxic substances, minimal labor and intellectual property protections. A cost advantage built with tools that the open market does not foresee and does not know how to respond to.
From 1980 onwards, Beijing invested in laboratories, doctoral programs, and a regulatory system built to accelerate clinical trials, with life sciences among the explicit priorities of the “Made in China 2025” plan. Starting a trial in China takes two to four months from authorization; in the United States it takes six to nine. Available patients are more numerous and enroll more quickly in large academic centers, instead of being distributed across dozens of different sites as in the fragmented American system. Even regulatory inspections reflect this asymmetry: the FDA can conduct surprise checks at pharmaceutical plants on American soil, but must agree on dates for those in China.
THE DEPENDENCE THAT ALREADY EXISTS
The BIOSECURE Act was presented as a response to the risk of strategic dependence. But that dependence already exists, and it is massive — not in the advanced research sector, but in the basic production sector that guarantees daily access to common drugs.
In 2002, 83% of drugs consumed in the United States were domestically produced. In 2024, that share had fallen to 37%. According to Yanzhong Huang of the Council on Foreign Relations, about 45% of the ingredients in American drugs come exclusively from China; considering the indirect channel — drugs manufactured in India with Chinese active ingredients — the share rises to 60%. Nearly 700 American medicines are made with at least one key ingredient sourced exclusively from China. The synthesis of amoxicillin, among the most common antibiotics, depends on four basic raw materials, each produced almost exclusively in China.
It is in this context that the qualitative leap documented by the Wall Street Journal now fits: China has ceased to be just the chemical warehouse of Western drugs and aims to become their research laboratory.
Today Shanghai and Suzhou are crowded with laboratories and startups. Researchers who until a few years ago replicated popular Western drugs are developing cutting-edge treatments in some of the most promising therapeutic categories: antibody-drug conjugates, a new generation of targeted chemotherapies; GLP-1 drugs for obesity; CAR-T therapies against tumors; molecular glue, a technology that causes the degradation of pathogenic proteins and paves the way for the treatment of tumors and diseases previously considered untreatable with drugs.
The ecosystem has also developed its own patented intelligence industry. When Novartis published a paper on molecular glue in July 2024, a Chinese microblog published a detailed analysis of related patents four days later — effectively an operational manual for researchers interested in developing rival compounds. A reaction speed that is hard to imagine in large Western research centers, burdened by internal bureaucracy and legal caution.
GluBio Therapeutics, founded in 2021 with Chinese capital, is a representative example. Its CEO, Gang Lu, was born in Shanghai, earned his doctorate at UCLA, and worked for years in Western pharmaceutical companies, including Bristol-Myers Squibb. He then founded a company that systematically studies the patents of his former employers, identifies margins for improvement, and develops therapeutic candidates for difficult diseases — such as sickle cell anemia — at lower costs and with shorter trial times. Sanofi invested in GluBio, believing its candidates could be developed faster and with fewer resources than would be possible elsewhere. It was among six licensing agreements and four equity investments the French group concluded with Chinese biotech firms in the last two years.
Gang Lu summarized the competitive advantage in three words: low cost, high quality, high speed.
THE PROBLEM THAT THE LAW DOES NOT SOLVE
Pharmaceutical companies have a structural reason to look at China with growing interest: the pressure to continuously replace drugs losing patent protection, in a context where internal research fails frequently. Chinese biotech fills pipeline gaps at lower costs and faster times.
The BIOSECURE Act targets major providers of contract research and genomic sequencing services, subcontractors working on behalf of others. The biotech companies developing the molecules that Pfizer and Gilead buy are a distinct phenomenon, which the law does not reach. Congress responded to a real risk with a tool that leaves the most relevant phenomenon intact.
The trajectory resembles that already followed in manufacturing: first consumer electronics, then solar, then electric vehicles. Each time the sequence is identical: outsourcing for cost efficiency, progressively ceding expertise, realizing the problem when supply chains are already consolidated and bringing them back would cost years and huge capital. In pharmaceuticals, we are already in the intermediate phase for basic production, and in the initial phase for advanced research. The structural alternative — building the same capacity in the West, at that speed and cost — would require regulatory reforms that no Western country seems willing to seriously face, and political patience incompatible with electoral cycles.
The coordinated response that would make sense — a Western bloc developing common markets and shared production capacities — clashes with the Trumpian logic, which aims to confront China with unilateral tools, including tariffs, as if the United States could manage this game alone.
Meanwhile, in Shenyang they study and patent. And in San Francisco they pay. And another stone is laid in the building of the decline of the American empire and the West.
(Article published on Phastidio.net)
