Scrutinized firm makes key US drugs
Chinese company eyed by Congress as possible threat
A Chinese company targeted by members of Congress over potential ties to the Chinese government makes blockbuster drugs for the American market that have been hailed as advances in the treatment of cancers, obesity, and debilitating illnesses such as cystic fibrosis.
WuXi AppTec is one of several companies lawmakers have identified as potential threats to the security of individual Americans’ genetic information and US intellectual property. A Senate committee approved a bill in March that aides say is intended to push US companies away from doing business with them.
But lawmakers discussing the bill in the Senate and the House have said almost nothing in hearings about the vast scope of work WuXi does for the US biotech and pharmaceutical industries — and patients. A New York Times review of hundreds of pages of records worldwide shows that WuXi is heavily embedded in the US medicine chest, making some or all of the main ingredients for multibillion-dollar therapies that are highly sought to treat cancers including some types of leukemia and lymphoma as well as obesity and HIV.
The congressional spotlight on the company has rattled the pharmaceutical industry, which is already struggling with widespread drug shortages now at a 20-year high. Some biotech executives have pushed back, trying to impress on Congress that a sudden decoupling could take some drugs out of the pipeline for years.
WuXi AppTec and an affiliated company, WuXi Biologics, grew rapidly, offering services to major US drugmakers that were seeking to shed costs and had shifted most manufacturing overseas in the last several decades.
WuXi companies developed a reputation for low-cost and reliable work by thousands of chemists who could create molecules and operate complex equipment to make them in bulk. By one estimate, WuXi has been involved in developing one-fourth of the drugs used in the United States. WuXi AppTec reported earning about $3.6 billion in revenue for its US work.
“They have become a onestop shop to a biotech,” said Kevin Lustig, founder of Scientist.com, a clearinghouse that matches drug companies seeking research help with contractors such as WuXi.
WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics have also received millions of dollars in tax incentives to build sprawling research and manufacturing sites in Massachusetts and Delaware that local government officials have welcomed as job and revenue generators.
The tension has grown since February, when four lawmakers asked the Commerce, Defense, and Treasury departments to investigate WuXi AppTec and affiliated companies, calling WuXi a “giant that threatens US intellectual property and national security.”
A House bill called the Biosecure Act linked the company to the People’s Liberation Army, the military arm of the Chinese Communist Party. The bill claims WuXi AppTec sponsored military-civil events and received military-civil fusion funding.
Richard Connell, the chief operating officer of WuXi AppTec in the United States and Europe, said the company participates in community events, which do not “imply any association with or endorsement of a government institution, political party or policy such as military-civil fusion.” He also said shareholders do not have control over the company or access to nonpublic information.
Last month, after a classified briefing with intelligence staff, the Senate Homeland Security Committee advanced a bill by a vote of 11-1: It would bar the US government from contracting with companies that work with WuXi. Government contracts with drugmakers are generally limited, though they were worth billions of dollars in revenue to companies that responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Connell defended the company’s record, saying the proposed legislation “relies on misleading allegations and inaccurate assertions against our company.”
Smaller biotech companies, which tend to rely on government grants and have fewer reserves, are among the most alarmed. Dr. Jonathan Kil, the CEO of Seattle-based Sound Pharmaceuticals, said WuXi has worked alongside the company for 16 years to develop a treatment for hearing loss and tinnitus, or ringing in the ear. Finding another contractor to make the drug could set the company back two years, he said.
“What I don’t want to see is that we get very anti-Chinese to the point where we’re not thinking correctly,” Kil said.
The drug that possibly captures WuXi’s most significant impact is Trikafta, manufactured by an affiliate in Shanghai and Changzhou to treat cystic fibrosis, a deadly disease that clogs the lungs with debilitating, thick mucus. The treatment is credited with clearing the lungs and extending by decades the life expectancy of about 40,000 US residents.