The Financial Times reported Thursday that WuXi AppTec is looking to sell its cell and gene therapy manufacturing unit, with facilities in Philadelphia, while WuXi Biologics wants to offload some of its production sites in Europe.
The two Chinese biotech companies, being targeted by the BIOSECURE Act as threats to U.S. national security, are considering selling off some of their businesses, according to the Financial Times.
WuXi AppTec has put its Advanced Therapies manufacturing unit (ATU) for cell and gene therapies—with four facilities in Philadelphia—up for sale, FT reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. WuXi Biologics, meanwhile, has brought on advisers to help gauge buyers’ interest in some of its production sites in Europe.
“We are assessing options for continuing ATU’s operations in line with our priorities: our employees and the patients who need essential, time-critical and life-saving treatments,” a WuXi AppTec spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to BioSpace.
The U.S. House of Representatives last month overwhelmingly passed the BIOSECURE Act in a 306–81 vote in favor of the proposed legislation, which seeks to prevent American biopharma companies from working with certain Chinese firms. WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics are among the China-based companies named in the bill, alongside Beijing Genomics Institute, MGI and Complete Genomics.
The BIOSECURE Act is now awaiting action from the Senate, where bipartisan support is also likely to be strong.
First introduced in January 2024, the BIOSECURE Act positions the biopharma industry as a core national security asset of the U.S. and is designed to prevent “foreign adversary biotech companies” from access to taxpayer dollars. Aside from trying to prevent key technologies from falling into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the proposed legislation also seeks to protect Americans’ genomic data and other sensitive biological information.
In May 2024, several House representatives filed an amended version of the BIOSECURE Act, which included a grandfather clause that would allow existing U.S. contracts with Chinese biotechs until Jan. 1, 2032.
If passed into law, the BIOSECURE Act is expected to have far-reaching implications for the biopharma industry, which currently is heavily dependent on third-party service providers based in China.
Companies including Merck, Kyverna Therapeutics and Iovance Biotherapeutics have warned investors that the BIOSECURE Act could have crippling effects on their production capacities for both licensed therapies and vaccines, as well as their respective investigational treatments.
A recent GlobalData report found the legislation could affect more than 120 U.S. drugs partnered with companies named in the BIOSECURE Act, of which about half are in clinical trials and a third are in early-stage preclinical studies and discovery.
Jaxon Tan, founder of Momentum AI Communications, and Ivy Yang, a columnist for the Financial Times Chinese, echoed these concerns in an opinion piece for BioSpace last month, writing that the BIOSECURE Act will affect both the supply of drugs in the U.S. and the industry’s ability to smoothly conduct clinical trials.
