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Biotech is a global business, and we’re better for it, said experts at the 2025 Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) International Convention in Boston.
International cooperation benefits the life sciences and is impossible to avoid, according to all seven participants in the June 19 closing mainstage panel on globalization, with representatives from the biotech industry, investors, and government.
Proof that biotech is international included the makeup of the participants at the 2025 convention, according to moderator Joseph Damond of Crowell Global Advisors.
“Forty-five percent of the participants this year are from outside the United States. I think that’s a sign that the global nature of this sector appears to be healthy,” he said. “We see more and more different countries at this convention. They want to be part of the system that began here in the U.S.—a system that the U.S. still leads but that is changing.”
Participants stressed that this global cooperation enables spectacular advances in biotech for all.
Venture capitalist Bibhash Mukhopadhyay pointed to the recent news of a global community of doctors, biotechnologists, hospitals, and patient organizations enabling a CRISPR-based breakthrough that saved a baby and may revolutionize rare disease treatment.
“Our industry needs that collaboration,” he said. “No one individual, one vertical has that.”
Global supply chain concerns
The drug-making supply chain is especially global, according to Jennifer Sheng, Citi’s Head of Healthcare Equity Capital Markets. She cited a BIO study showing “90% of the components of FDA-approved drugs come from outside the U.S.”
During COVID, there was a realization of the benefits of having drug manufacturing located in the U.S., she said. While a trend toward reshoring began a few years ago, we’re hearing more about this lately, apparently inspired by the threat of tariffs, according to Sheng.
“We’ve seen a lot of these announcements recently from large-cap pharma, with Johnson & Johnson planning $55 billion, Eli Lilly about $27 billion, and I think for Novartis over the next five years it’s going to be about $50 billion of U.S. manufacturing,” Sheng said.
Another lesson from COVID was that supply chains are particularly vulnerable in less-developed countries, panelists said.
The idea of establishing domestic drug manufacturing in each country is not realistic, according to Generate:Biomedicines CEO Michael Nally. Still, he said, COVID taught us that many African countries need stronger drug-making infrastructure.
While Steffen Thirstrup, M.D., Chief Medical Officer at the European Medicines Agency (EMA), agreed that Africa’s drug-making capacity needs to be strengthened, he said it’s more practical to work on overall improvements that ensure stronger supplies for all the larger regions, rather than trying to make each country self-sufficient in drug production.
“COVID showed us that our resilience against something like a pandemic is not good, but I think we should think about building global resilience that also has an impact on the regional level,” Thirstrup said.
The potential of unfettered global biotech
“The world has seen a great growth in cross-border global collaboration in the biotech sector over the last decade or more,” said moderator Damond.
A concrete example came from Anthony Japour, M.D., CEO of iTolerance, which is working on immunosuppression for transplantation. He said his firm built a connection with a Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization in Lithuania. “We did a global search for the best manufacturer based on cost but also in terms of ability to do what we need, and we found that the best company was in the EU,” Japour said.
The U.S. can also benefit from importing innovations like AI-assisted drug regulation, which can expedite approvals, said Erika Smith, CEO of EpiTET Therapeutics.
Given the science and public health benefits of a freer flow of resources and a more open supply chain, panelists agreed that tariffs would create a significant and unnecessary obstacle to biotech innovation. The heads of small biotechs noted that tariffs or other obstructions to global trade would reduce progress and increase costs for drug development.
Nally said tariffs will not be able to keep any technology within one country, as technology spreads around the world quickly.
“That genie is out of the bottle,” he said. “To pursue a protectionist agenda actually is trying to restrict progress in many respects, and I’m not sure there are great examples of where that has succeeded massively in the course of history.”
Rather than seeking to thwart the development of a global biotech ecosystem, we need to embrace the progress that is being achieved around the world, and is being driven even faster with AI, said panelists.
“If you think about all of the medical advances that have come out of this industry over the last 100 years, we now face the prospect of a similar level of productivity over the course of the next decade,” he said. “This will be the biological century.”
