Some of the biggest names in biotech debated China’s impact on biotech and what it means for the United States on Aug. 6, in front of an audience that filled the first floor of MIT’s Koch Institute building.
The event, organized by biotech publication Endpoints News, was sparked by a testy back-and-forth on X, formerly Twitter, between Jason Kelly, CEO of former Cambridge biotech Ginkgo Bioworks, and Peter Kolchinsky, managing partner of Boston-based healthcare investment company RA Capital Management.
Kelly had called out Kolchinsky for “working against US startups and US biotech scientists” after RA Capital invested in a company that licensed a gene-editing therapy from China. Kolchinsky shot back about “supply chain protectionism” as things spilled over onto LinkedIn, with Kelly baiting Kolchinsky to not “wuss out” and Kolchinsky mocking Kelly for his vocabulary.
The bickering continued in person, leaving MIT Professor Fiona Murray, also on the panel, awkwardly in the middle as the other two teed off.
“Common enemy” or sole foe?
Kolchinsky argued that Chinese and U.S. researchers face a “common enemy” of disease, so avoiding research and development (R&D) ties with China risks putting patients in limbo because of slower processes elsewhere. The U.S. and Europe could move successful R&D back home for later-stage development and production
Kelly, former chair of the US National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, countered that allowing drug discovery and early development jobs to migrate overseas could hollow out the domestic industry, including in major early development hubs like Kendall Square. He said he attended a recent event to encourage underprivileged students to enter the biotech industry, but many of the industry representatives boasted about business connections in China. “Where are these kids going to work?” Kelly said. “Our professed strategy for this industry is to offshore this.”
MIT’s Murray landed somewhere between the two, describing China as a “peer adversary” – a designation she has adopted as chair of the NATO Innovation Fund, a €1 billion ($1.15 billion) venture-capital fund backed by 24 NATO countries, not including the U.S. Still, she rejected a wholesale split between the countries’ biotech sectors. “Should we use the tools of economic statecraft to make sure we have a resilient life sciences sector,” she asked rhetorically, answering, “absolutely.”
“Really good, really fast, and really cheap”
A 2025 Nature analysis found that the value of deals in which companies paid for the rights to develop and sell drugs originating in China grew from $5 billion in 2020 to over $50 billion last year, a jump from 3 to 30 percent of all worldwide value. China also now accounts for close to a third of medical devices and technologies used by healthcare professionals to treat patients.
China’s ascendance in biotech matters to Cambridge and Kendall Square. Cambridge’s life sciences sector is still recovering from a steep post-pandemic downturn as China continues to make waves. A recent lab-market report from the Dallas-based real estate firm Lincoln Property Company put vacancy rates at around 23 percent, up from close to zero in 2022. However, it was the first quarter since 2024 where more lab space was occupied than left vacant, a possible sign of a steady recovery.
Drew Armstrong, executive editor at Endpoints and the evening’s moderator, told Cambridge Day the appeal of Chinese biotech is simple to executives in the industry: it’s “really good, really fast and really cheap.” This has spurred the rise of “ultralight” U.S. biotech companies staffed by skeleton crews of five to 10 employees, with most lab work outsourced to China.
That shift is a natural progression for the industry, said Matthew Glime, CEO of New York healthcare company Roivant Sciences, speaking on a different panel. Despite this, he believes that the lucrative U.S. market means patients here will have access to new drugs no matter where they’re made. He called the prices drugmakers can charge “the single [most important] thing” protecting American patients’ access to medicine. While there is political pressure for price reductions in the market that may lead to price drops, “right now that is what gets us access to medicines fast,” said Glime.
But Strand Therapeutics CEO Jacob Becraft, who began his biotech career at MIT, said China’s rise has created a “Sputnik moment” for U.S. biotech. Becraft, a Rust Belt baby who grew up in a small town in Central Illinois, exhorted U.S. companies and regulators to rise to the challenge.
“Let’s [expletive] go, we should be able to run clinical trials faster, [they] are a resource,” he said. He noted that 86 percent of non-metropolitan hospitals run no trials at all, making it difficult for patients in rural areas to get access to cutting edge treatment.
Becraft also called recent reports of pediatric deaths in Chinese gene-therapy trials “scary” and “serious.”
“If we’re going to accept clinical trial data from China, the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] has to hold them to the same sort of inspections standards that are happening here,” Becraft said.
Andrew Baum, senior strategic advisor to Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla, believed that the news would bring with it a tightening of regulations in China, saying how Beijing does not want to be seen as “the Wild West of drug development.” An interview with Baum was the final event of the evening. He said China had already established more rules around investigator-initiated trials. He predicted that such regulation would “normalize the playing field” and slow the speed of drug development in China. In May, Pfizer, which has much of its R&D in Cambridge, signed a deal worth close to $10.5 billion with Chinese biotech Innovent Biologics for the development of eight early-stage cancer medicines and four discovery programs proposed by Pfizer.
While biotech is a huge economic driver for Cambridge and Greater Boston, MassBio spokesperson Ben Bradford, who did not attend Thursday’s event, said close to 80 percent of the trade group’s 1,700 members had no revenue and tiny workforces. These companies depend upon venture funding, which has dropped sharply in Massachusetts since 2021.
Last year, biotech companies headquartered in Massachusetts received $6.85 billion in venture capital funding, the lowest total since 2019, and nearly half of the sum received in 2021. Bradford attributed this to factors including a pullback from general investors who plowed money into the industry during the pandemic but since have shifted away. Bradford said the fear is that lack of investment in innovative companies will in the long-term mean “Cambridge and Massachusetts will certainly cede jobs to other locations.”
This story was updated to correct the spelling of Ginkgo Bioworks.
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