The Empire of Wuxi

China's Biotech Giant

This post originally appeared in ChinaTalk.

“Instead of contracting one company to test the initial drug, another to optimize its potency, and another to manufacture it at commercial scale, drug companies could work with WuXi through the entire pipeline.”

Lucas Fluegel and Nick Corvino team up to tackle Chinese biotech. Lucas is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he explores biotech and biosecurity policy. He did his Ph.D. research in biochemistry and bacterial genomics at the Scripps Research Institute.

China wants to be the world’s biotech superpower. But to understand how it got here, it’s best to start with its crown jewel: the WuXi companies.

The WuXi companies are the dominant biotech services consortium in China and have become the lightning rod of U.S. political wrath, most notably as an early target of the BIOSECURE Act.