The United States remains the global leader in biotechnology, but its advantage over China is shrinking and could disappear by 2030, according to a new Biotech Scorecard released by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a nonprofit and nonpartisan initiative focused on strengthening America’s long-term competitiveness in artificial intelligence.
The SCSP’s Tech Scorecard methodology assesses national competitiveness across five categories: Innovation Leadership, Market Ecosystem, Talent Pipeline, Industrial Capacity, and National Leverage. The United States leads in Innovation Leadership, Market Ecosystem, and Talent Pipeline, while China appears ahead in Industrial Capacity and National Leverage, the report found.
China’s progress is the product of two decades of deliberate national strategy, the analysts write. By contrast, the American position is described as “a return on research investments made decades ago, sustained by a capital market that rewards its strongest performers.” The report focuses on the biopharmaceuticals sector as an example of China’s acceleration in National Leverage and Industrial Capacity.
A key difference lies in government support. Most U.S. government funding for biotechnology goes to basic research, and the report notes a persistent lack of urgency in expanding support for commercializing drug products. “Approval timelines for drugs entering clinical trials and going to domestic markets are driven by government policy, and can help accelerate, or slow down, the pipeline of innovation,” the SCSP authors emphasize.
China, meanwhile, actively supports biotech startups through the process of acquiring capital to build pilot capacity, scale up production, and reach markets, without waiting for a definitive return on these expanded investments. This strategy includes preferential taxation, below-market lending, and direct subsidies. The United States tends to leave this aspect of biotechnology development to the private sector.
The implications extend beyond biopharmaceuticals. As artificial intelligence allows scientists to predict molecular activity, the expensive early stages of drug discovery will likely decrease, and the competitive advantage will shift to testing, manufacturing, and commercializing a promising drug candidate. “Whether the United States retains its edge depends both on model quality and how quickly it can move a computationally generated candidate through trials, approval, and manufacture before a competitor improves on it,” the report states.
The full report is available at scsp.ai. The scorecard’s findings underscore that the biotech competition is not decided in a single field but across supply chains, manufacturing capacity, data holdings, and regulatory speed—areas where China’s state-driven model may offer enduring advantages if U.S. policy does not adapt.
