Senate committee advances bill targeting Chinese manufacturers as BIO faces attack for backing WuXi

A Sen­ate com­mit­tee on Wednes­day moved a con­tentious bill for­ward that would pro­hib­it many bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies from us­ing cer­tain for­eign man­u­fac­tur­ing and tri­al ser­vice providers like Chi­na’s WuXi AppTec, re­fer­ring to them as “com­pa­nies of con­cern.”

The Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty and Gov­ern­men­tal Af­fairs Com­mit­tee vot­ed 11-1 to ad­vance the bill, which is part of a wider push from law­mak­ers on both sides of the aisle to lim­it Chi­na’s in­flu­ence in the US. That think­ing is gain­ing po­lit­i­cal steam, but in­dus­try has said that these laws would al­so make busi­ness dif­fi­cult for a large num­ber of bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies that re­ly on Chi­nese com­pa­nies for clin­i­cal re­search and man­u­fac­tur­ing sup­port.

Unlock this article instantly by becoming a free subscriber.

You’ll get access to free articles each month, plus you can customize what newsletters get delivered to your inbox each week, including breaking news.