- The report treats biotechnology as a general purpose technology whose effects could extend across health, agriculture, energy, materials, manufacturing, data, and supply chains.
- It argues that U.S. leadership depends on coordinated public-private action because market forces alone may not commercialize, diffuse, and scale laboratory breakthroughs into durable national advantage.
- The report proposes biotechnology moonshots focused on open genomic resources, biosecurity readiness, and synthetic-cell research to advance fundamental science and catalyze ecosystem-wide effort.
- It emphasizes domestic biomanufacturing as a commercialization and supply-chain priority, including local medicine production, expanded manufacturing infrastructure, and incentives for trusted equipment capacity.
- The report calls for data and infrastructure investments, including a global information-sharing network, strategic genomic data resources, and cloud-based labs that broaden access to experimental capabilities.
This report sets out a biotechnology policy roadmap for coordinated action by academia, industry, government, allies, and partners to sustain U.S. leadership from a national security perspective. It argues that biotechnology is becoming a general purpose technology that will reshape health, agriculture, energy, materials, industrial production, and supply chains while converging with artificial intelligence, computing, chemistry, data science, and other fields. The report situates the agenda in a competitive environment in which the United States retains strengths in genetic engineering and molecular biology but faces risks from fragmented institutions, commercialization barriers, rival ecosystems, and foreign platforms that may exploit biodata and market access. Its approach combines framing principles with action-plan recommendations organized around moonshots, commercialization, ecosystem institutions, data and lab infrastructure, workforce development, input security, democratic cooperation, and governance guardrails. Principal proposals include open genomic resources, a medical shield, synthetic-cell research, domestic biomanufacturing, biobanks, cloud labs, workforce pipelines, supply-chain incentives, allied biomanufacturing cooperation, sector security review, limits on risky foreign biotech platforms, and built-in platform security. The policy relevance is the report’s call for sustained public-private partnership and selective guardrails to help democracies innovate faster while protecting national security, privacy, and standards.
As much as 60 percent of everything manufactured in the world today could one day be biomanufactured, making this sector a multi-trillion dollar game.
SCSP
- Launch Biotechnology “Moonshots” to Advance Fundamental S&T. Pursue audacious goals like an open-source genetic library, a 24/7 national Medshield, and a fully synthetic cell.
- Align Incentives for Biotechnology Commercialization, Diffusion, and Scale. Solve commercialization challenges by funding domestic biomanufacturing at scale and biomanufacturing medicines locally.
- Empower the Entire Innovation Ecosystem. Establish university Centers of Excellence, augment the National Labs, and expand biomanufacturing institutes.
- Build the Infrastructure That Will Allow Us to Tap Into Biotech’s Full Potential. Build out a Global Bionet, treat genomic data as a strategic resource, and scale cloud-based life science research.
Published by the Special Competitive Studies Project. Co-publishers and external authors, where they exist, are credited in the byline above.