Theresa Campobasso

Theresa Campobasso is senior vice president at Aardwolf Global Solutions and a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who specialized in counterintelligence support to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s office of counterintelligence. Her expertise spans supply-chain security across the life sciences, with a deep focus on China and the Middle East.

Campobasso has joined Open Door Salon twice, opening and then extending the show’s series on China and the life sciences. In her most recent conversation she argued that the BIOSECURE Act is only an opening signal, and walked through what is coming next: the likely expansion of the rules to active pharmaceutical ingredients and precursors, the U.S. International Trade Commission’s investigation into Chinese state subsidies, and the proposed COINS Act, which would put U.S. investment, licensing, and joint ventures in Chinese biotech under government review. She made the case that existing deals are unlikely to be grandfathered in, detailed the specific ways intellectual property is taken, and explained why the roughly 28 percent of top pharma deals tied to Chinese biotech is a concentration most dealmakers have stress-tested for the wrong risks.

In her first appearance, her central argument was that most companies do strong third-party risk management on the partner directly in front of them, then stop, and that is exactly where the risk begins. Obfuscated state ownership, Chinese government and military presence, and hidden foreign ownership, control, and influence (FOCI) tend to live in tiers three through five of the supply chain, below where almost anyone looks.

Across that conversation she covered intellectual-property and patent theft; forced-labor exposure under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) and the “trust but verify” discipline it demands; and the BIOSECURE Act’s commercial-channel gap, where a private pharmaceutical company can still license molecules, co-develop IP, and run discovery on Chinese AI platforms untouched by the law. She also read the geopolitics: how the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are handing China an opening on energy security.

Her throughline across both visits is an optimistic one. Mapping a supply chain down to the raw material, “the hole in the ground” it came from, is possible today in a way it was not five years ago, because big-data tools plus generative and agentic AI can surface hidden connections across vast datasets at a scale and speed no human team could.