Bioindustrial Sovereignty: Can the U.S. Stay Ahead?
Our bioindustrial advantage is vulnerable. Here’s why, and how we secure it.
For decades, the United States has watched a familiar pattern unfold in strategically important technologies. When a domain becomes foundational to economic output, national security, and industrial resilience, the countries that treat it as strategic infrastructure shape global outcomes. Biotechnology is now entering that phase.
Relinquishing leadership in biotech would have consequences far beyond economics. From energy and food systems to human health and defense readiness, engineered biology is increasingly determining national strength and security. If the U.S. intends to remain competitive and resilient in the coming decades, maintaining leadership in biotechnology is not optional, and early-stage investment will play a critical role.
Written by Mackenzie Scurka and edited by Jennifer Kan, PhD
This summer, China announced plans to support pilot biomanufacturing plants across 20 companies by 2027. By the fall, that plan had been expanded and formalized to include 43 companies spanning 37 industry directions and six major application areas, including raw material industries, equipment manufacturing, consumer goods industries, information technology, emerging and future industries, and common needs. The objective? To establish a national pilot production network within the next two years – likely the largest coordinated biomanufacturing scale up effort in the world.
While China continues to invest in biopharmaceutical innovation, momentum is increasingly shifting toward industrial biotechnology, or “bioindustrials”, where engineered biology fundamentally changes how ingredients, chemicals, materials, fuels, fertilizers, and other critical intermediates are produced at scale.
Heavy investment in industrial biotechnology follows a well-established national industrial strategy: concentrate capital and policy support in a critical upstream technology, scale faster than global competitors, and lock in cost and supply-chain advantages over time. China applied this strategy to rare earths in the 1990s by scaling extraction and processing capacity until it controlled the majority of global supply. In the 1970s-1980s, Japan dominated the DRAM semiconductor market by investing aggressively in scale, process improvement, and yield improvement, successfully driving out global competition with sustained cost pressures. South Korea reached peak dominance in shipbuilding in the 2000s by having the state provide long-term subsidized capital, tolerate years of below-cost pricing, and scale shipyard capacity faster than other countries until learning-curve and cost advantages became structural.
Bioindustrials now fit this same pattern. Biomanufacturing enables greater self-sufficiency by reducing reliance on imported oil, chemicals, and critical materials, allowing domestic production from biomass and waste streams. At scale, it creates durable cost advantages through improved fermentation efficiency, AI-enabled process optimization, and cumulative learning effects. Control over bio-based production of chemicals, fuels, and materials allows nations to dominate upstream inputs and shape downstream global supply chains – just as prior industrial leaders have done in energy, electronics, and infrastructure.
Biotechnology is often perceived as slow and risky as drugs take a long time to develop, the probability of success is low, and the upfront cost is high. Commercializing bioindustrials is different. Products such as enzymes, specialty materials, and industrial chemicals have short paths to market and face lower regulatory barriers. Companies can reach profitability quickly with a short payback period. At the same time, biomanufacturing supports energy security and climate objectives by converting low-cost feedstocks into valuable outputs. These capabilities have direct national security implications as well, enabling on-demand production of materials and chemicals critical to defense logistics and supply-chain resilience during periods of disruption. By establishing early leadership in biotechnology, countries can shape global technical standards and regulatory norms, translating into long-term structural advantages.
But crucially, the pace at which these advantages can be captured has changed.
The speed at which progress in biotechnology has accelerated over the past decade would not have been possible without advances in AI. AI has fundamentally changed biotech research: tasks that once required years of lab work can now be completed in weeks or even days, and open-source tools like DeepMind’s AlphaFold have significantly lowered barriers to entry. However, different political and economic systems are taking markedly different approaches to applying AI in this domain.
The United States’ approach has been largely compute-driven and private-sector-led, with an emphasis on general-purpose models intended to eventually solve complex biological problems. Significant investment has flowed into foundational bio-AI platforms, drug discovery models, and large-scale computational infrastructure. Another approach treats AI primarily as an industrial tool, explicitly directed toward improving manufacturing efficiency, reducing costs, and accelerating biomanufacturing scale-up. In China, this orientation has been formalized at the national level, with biomanufacturing-enhancing AI elevated as a priority in the 15th Five-Year Plan. Chinese biomanufacturers also benefit from lower energy costs, subsidized infrastructure, and government-supported projects.
The result is a growing asymmetry. While the United States leads in frontier AI and biological discovery, preserving bioindustrial leadership will require deeper coordination and sustained investment. Important efforts are underway across the federal government through agencies such as the Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Commerce (DOC), and the Department of Agriculture (USDA). In addition, initiatives like BioMADE strengthen domestic bioindustrial capacity and de-risk scale-up through the construction of hundreds of thousands of square feet of pilot plants, formalized workforce development plants, and the efficient deployment of millions of dollars in awards intended to bridge the gap between lab breakthroughs and commercial production.
That said, biomanufacturing is still in the process of developing the same level of sustained coordination and strategic alignment that has defined U.S. efforts in frontier AI. Today, responsibility is shared across multiple agencies, each advancing critical pieces of the ecosystem. There is an opportunity to build on this strong foundation by further strengthening coordination, connecting pilots to full-scale deployment, and aligning incentives across agencies to elevate industrial biomanufacturing as a core national priority.
China is not the only other major player. The EU is also moving deliberately to scale its bioeconomy through coordinated industrial policy. Under the EU Net-Zero Industry Act and in a Bioeconomy Strategy plan released recently by the European Commission, European policymakers are focused on accelerating deployment from lab to market, expanding pilot and demonstration-scale capacity, streamlining regulation, mobilizing blended public-private financing, and securing biomass and feedstock supply chains across Member States. Together, these efforts aim to translate Europe’s strong scientific base into industrial-scale bio-based production and reduce dependence on imported fossil inputs.
If leadership in biotechnology consolidates outside the United States, economic influence would shift, and the national security risks would be significant. Reliance on foreign bio-based supply chains would leave U.S. food systems, industrial inputs, and critical materials vulnerable to geopolitical disruption. At the same time, advanced biotech capabilities introduce difficult security challenges, from population-scale biological data collection, agriculture disruption, to the dual-use risks of engineered organisms. Maintaining domestic leadership, capacity, and control in these technologies is essential.
So… what can be done?
There is still time for the United States to respond, but the choices made now will be path-dependent. The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) has called for a minimum of $15 billion in federal investment over five years to catalyze private capital, alongside a coordinated national strategy spanning leadership, scale-up, defense integration, innovation protection, workforce development, and allied coordination. At a baseline, the U.S. must ensure that breakthroughs developed domestically can also be manufactured at home, at scale, on competitive economic terms, and with safeguards against IP theft and supply-chain dependence. Achieving this will require bringing government into the technology development process earlier and establishing transparent, continuous engagement with regulators to avoid surprise delays that stall commercialization.
Early-stage capital will be decisive in whether that ecosystem takes shape. The companies defining future biomanufacturing processes, fermentation economics, and production architectures are being built now, well before industrial pathways are locked in. To succeed, the U.S. biotech ecosystem must address several structural challenges: developing repeatable frameworks for academic–industry partnerships beyond biopharma; enabling secure, interoperable biological data sharing to support collaboration; and making substantial investments in domestic fermentation capacity to compete on both cost and scale.
As early-stage investors with a specialist focus on bioindustrials, we have been invited into conversations with DARPA and the NSCEB to share on-the-ground perspectives and help strengthen coordination between the public and private sectors. We’ve seen encouraging signals and had productive discussions, but momentum must translate into sustained action. The decisions we make in the coming years will shape the trajectory of biotechnology, and whether the United States continues to lead, or becomes dependent on those who do.