The Empire of Wuxi

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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.When we say “WuXi,” we don’t just mean WuXi AppTec. Although this family of companies is often spoken about as if it were a single company, in reality, it is a group of companies comprised of WuXi AppTec (药明康德), WuXi Biologics (药明生物), and a set of tightly integrated businesses, all more or less under the same leadership but dispersed throughout the industry. Together, they are stronger than the sum of their parts, and form what we envision as the Empire of WuXi (hereafter just “Wuxi”).The TSMC analogy is tempting, since just as TSMC manufactures chips for companies like NVIDIA and AMD, WuXi, instead of discovering and commercializing its own blockbuster drugs, it provides the services (chemistry, testing, manufacturing) that allow others to do so. And both have the ability to gut-punch the global economy if their employees stop coming to work.But AI analogies, tempting as they are, can do more harm than good. TSMC sits at a true chokepoint, with essentially no m…