Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has become one of the Democratic Party’s leading voices raising concerns about the pharmaceutical industry’s growing ties to China. U.S. drugmakers are increasingly turning to Chinese firms for research and development, early-stage clinical trials, biologics work, and licensing agreements that allow American companies to market Chinese-developed medicines under their own brands. As those partnerships expand, Gillibrand has questioned whether investment capital, innovation, and future biotechnology leadership could increasingly shift toward China at the expense of the United States.
“One of the things that should worry us most and should immediately spark Congressional action is China’s top-to-bottom efforts to dominate the next generation of biotechnology,” Sen. Gillibrand said during a Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing on June 17. “It should be a wake-up call to all of our members that China may surpass us in a few years, not decades, in the critical technology area. Biotech is not a future inflection point; it’s a present one.”
The hearing focused on China’s role in the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain and financial scams. Both topics were given equal time. The four witnesses were all commissioners from the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), a body of experts appointed by Congress to discuss China policy with outside experts, and provide lawmakers with policy recommendations.
Chairman Rick Scott (R-FL) later tugged on the biotech thread a bit harder during the Q&A period. He noted Chinese contract manufacturing Wuxi Apptec’s addition to the Department of Defense’s 1260H Entity List. Scott asked if the company should be added to the list of biotechnology companies of concern under the BIOSECURE Act. Wuxi has been a tough nut to crack in the first go-round of this bill. The company has long standing relationships with nearly all Western pharmaceutical labs, such as Pfizer. The BIOSECURE Act became law in December 2025 as part of the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act. It restricts federal agencies from contracting with companies on that list. It does not prevent multinational pharma labs from working with them, unless working on a federal government contract. And in that case, they could get a waiver.
Leland Miller, a commissioner from the USCC, said Wuxi was now an integral part of most American pharmaceutical companies. [Testimony]
Wuxi has become “more and more integrated” into the way U.S. pharmaceutical companies build their supply chains, outsource research and test their drugs.
“We don’t have a really good idea of how deep this is or how deep the reliance is, although we know their presence is everywhere,” Miller told Sen. Scott. “I think that the larger issue to deal with when we’re looking at a company like Wuxi or we’re looking at China’s role in biotech and pharmaceuticals is that China’s beating the hell out of us right now. What we saw in 2020 was the share of pharmaceutical licensing deals that were going to China were very small, maybe three percent to five percent annually. But every year we can see it is rising. It’s gone from five percent, to 15 percent, to 25 percent. We’re on track for over 40 percent, possibly much more of pharmaceutical licensing deals to be taken by Western pharmaceutical giants in the West and be brought to China and transferring know-how, expertise, capital,” he said about licensing agreements. These agreements are essentially Western labs agreeing to sell a drug made in China, often developed by a Chinese lab, and sell it as an American name brand or generic in the U.S.
Miller, who has financial markets expertise as head of the China Beige Book, confirmed Gillibrand’s long-term view of where biotech was heading. It is heading East.
“We are building up China as an innovation hub and helping in its attempts to become a biotech power,” he said. He recommended restrictions on Wuxi.
Gillibrand asked the Commission members for recommendations on where to begin to circle the wagons around domestic pharma. USCC Commissioner Chris Slevin recommended beginning with antibiotics. [Testimony]
“I’d say start with generic antibiotics. We make zero right now in this country,” Slevin said. “It’s imperative we quickly look at some of the work that this Committee has taken on already as it relates to purchasing agreements, and how to make the economics work. To do that, we need to be looking at the government as a major purchaser, and you need to be signing long-term purchasing agreements to make those economics work.”
Slevin is the former Chief of Staff to Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. He helped oversee Commerce during the implementation of the CHIPS Act and managed the DoC during its expanded role in export controls. He was an economic policy advisor for former Senator Sherrod Brown (D) from Ohio.
Sen. Gillibrand Raises Concerns About China’s Ability To Attract U.S. Biotech Investment, Partners
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has become one of the Democratic Party’s leading voices raising concerns about the pharmaceutical industry’s growing ties to China. U.S. drugmakers are increasingly turning to Chinese firms for research and development, early-stage clinical trials, biologics work, and licensing agreements that allow American companies to market Chinese-developed medicines under their own brands. As those partnerships expand, Gillibrand has questioned whether investment capital, innovation, and future biotechnology leadership could increasingly shift toward China at the expense of the United States.
“One of the things that should worry us most and should immediately spark Congressional action is China’s top-to-bottom efforts to dominate the next generation of biotechnology,” Sen. Gillibrand said during a Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing on June 17. “It should be a wake-up call to all of our members that China may surpass us in a few years, not decades, in the critical technology area. Biotech is not a future inflection point; it’s a present one.”
The hearing focused on China’s role in the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain and financial scams. Both topics were given equal time. The four witnesses were all commissioners from the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), a body of experts appointed by Congress to discuss China policy with outside experts, and provide lawmakers with policy recommendations.
Chairman Rick Scott (R-FL) later tugged on the biotech thread a bit harder during the Q&A period. He noted Chinese contract manufacturing Wuxi Apptec’s addition to the Department of Defense’s 1260H Entity List. Scott asked if the company should be added to the list of biotechnology companies of concern under the BIOSECURE Act. Wuxi has been a tough nut to crack in the first go-round of this bill. The company has long standing relationships with nearly all Western pharmaceutical labs, such as Pfizer. The BIOSECURE Act became law in December 2025 as part of the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act. It restricts federal agencies from contracting with companies on that list. It does not prevent multinational pharma labs from working with them, unless working on a federal government contract. And in that case, they could get a waiver.
Leland Miller, a commissioner from the USCC, said Wuxi was now an integral part of most American pharmaceutical companies. [Testimony]
Wuxi has become “more and more integrated” into the way U.S. pharmaceutical companies build their supply chains, outsource research and test their drugs.
“We don’t have a really good idea of how deep this is or how deep the reliance is, although we know their presence is everywhere,” Miller told Sen. Scott. “I think that the larger issue to deal with when we’re looking at a company like Wuxi or we’re looking at China’s role in biotech and pharmaceuticals is that China’s beating the hell out of us right now. What we saw in 2020 was the share of pharmaceutical licensing deals that were going to China were very small, maybe three percent to five percent annually. But every year we can see it is rising. It’s gone from five percent, to 15 percent, to 25 percent. We’re on track for over 40 percent, possibly much more of pharmaceutical licensing deals to be taken by Western pharmaceutical giants in the West and be brought to China and transferring know-how, expertise, capital,” he said about licensing agreements. These agreements are essentially Western labs agreeing to sell a drug made in China, often developed by a Chinese lab, and sell it as an American name brand or generic in the U.S.
Miller, who has financial markets expertise as head of the China Beige Book, confirmed Gillibrand’s long-term view of where biotech was heading. It is heading East.
“We are building up China as an innovation hub and helping in its attempts to become a biotech power,” he said. He recommended restrictions on Wuxi.
Gillibrand asked the Commission members for recommendations on where to begin to circle the wagons around domestic pharma. USCC Commissioner Chris Slevin recommended beginning with antibiotics. [Testimony]
“I’d say start with generic antibiotics. We make zero right now in this country,” Slevin said. “It’s imperative we quickly look at some of the work that this Committee has taken on already as it relates to purchasing agreements, and how to make the economics work. To do that, we need to be looking at the government as a major purchaser, and you need to be signing long-term purchasing agreements to make those economics work.”
Slevin is the former Chief of Staff to Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. He helped oversee Commerce during the implementation of the CHIPS Act and managed the DoC during its expanded role in export controls. He was an economic policy advisor for former Senator Sherrod Brown (D) from Ohio.
A New Way of Thinking About the Biotech Ecosystem is Needed
The Senate Aging Committee has had at least three hearings this year on pharmaceutical supply chains. Advanced biotechnology and the overall generic drug supply chain has been part of the conversation all year. The Committee does not sign off on bills; but they do recommend them. Both Scott and Gillibrand advocated for the CLEAR Labels Act, a bill that would require labeling where the active pharmaceutical ingredients in the medicine was made, rather than where it was shaped into a pill, turned into a capsule, or poured into a bottle.
The Senate’s focus on the pharmaceuticals supply chain runs across Committees. Following an Oct. 2025 report by CPA titled “The New Biotech Cold War,” the Senate Committee on Health, Education and Labor Pensions (HELP) held a hearing titled “The Future of Biotech.” That same month, Senior Economist Andrew Rechenberg testified before Senate Aging in a hearing on fixing America’s broken drug supply chain. CPA then beat the drum on biotech again in January in a report by Senior Economist Mihir Torsekar. And in February, CPA published a report specific to antibiotics; a report Sen. Scott cited in his opening remarks.
USCC witness Joshua Hodges suggested Washington consider using economic statecraft to better protect the domestic supply chain. [Testimony] He recommended using the Development Finance Corporation as a China-diversification tool. The DFC might help fund labs away from China, but that falls within the framework of friend-shoring, or near-shoring, opposed to reshoring. Reshoring is especially important for critical drugs and antibiotics. Worth noting, during the Covid pandemic, India withheld exports of some generic drugs to cater to its own billion inhabitants. By most standards in Washington, India would be considered an ally.
Hodges suggested that the government needed to treat certain economic sectors as national security imperatives. He doubts private businesses will remap supply chains on their own.
“Our economic and national security and the lives of our citizens are threatened because we were asleep at the wheel as a nation and did nothing to track and prepare for this,” said Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH). He asked Miller if that was a fair conclusion and Miller agreed that it was.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) asked about drug safety.
“How safe do we feel about the ingredients in pharmaceuticals from China, and how can we depend on that safety? It seems we just pretty much take it for granted that they’re going to do the right thing because we don’t make much of it here, right?” he asked.
“That’s right,” Slevin said. FDA inspections in Asia are lackluster.
“The last several decades we’ve seen pharmaceutical production increasingly move offshore, and so the proximity that our agencies have to inspect unannounced is more difficult to execute when the vast majority of facilities are overseas, particularly in China,” Slevin said.
Sen. Scott said the Committee was “pushing the federal government every day to support domestic manufacturing and leverage the full buying power of the government to support our domestic drug makers.” The Senator’s position is different than Hodges’ suggestion of using government loans to help allies integrate and build out a global biotech ecosystem. The top line ambition here should be maintaining and expanding advanced biotechnology in the U.S., and increasing investment to add capacity for the production of critical medicines domestically.
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