Congress must take urgent action to strengthen the US biotechnology industry or risk irrevocably falling behind China, warns a recent report from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. The report urges Congress to disburse billions of dollars in federal funding over the next five years to grow the domestic biotech industry, end supply-chain dependencies on China, and protect US intellectual property from theft.
The report’s final recommendations are organized into six focus areas: making biotechnology a national priority, mobilizing the private sector, maximizing the benefits of biotechnology for defense, out-innovating strategic competitors, boosting the biotechnology workforce, and working with allies and partners. The report authors also propose what they call grand research challenges: One focuses on “making biotechnology predictably engineerable,” and the other is centered on “making biomanufacturing scale-up predictable, rapid, and cost-competitive.”
Federal science agencies play a key role in the report’s recommendations. The report proposes, for example,...
