Theresa Campobasso, Ex-Marine Intel Officer, on Why BIOSECURE Won’t Protect Pharma From China

The BIOSECURE Act was written to keep Chinese biotech out of the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain. In the first episode of Open Door Salon’s series on China and the life sciences, Theresa Campobasso, senior vice president at Aardwolf Global Solutions and a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer, explains why the law leaves a door wide open, and where the real risk actually lives.

Most companies run a third-party check on a new partner, clear it, and move on. That, Campobasso argues, is exactly where the risk begins. Obfuscated state ownership, Chinese government and military presence, and hidden foreign ownership, control, and influence tend to sit in tiers three through five of the supply chain, below where almost anyone looks. Mapping only the first tier leaves the rest invisible.

She and host Lori Ellis trace the full picture: intellectual-property and patent theft, forced-labor exposure under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and the “trust but verify” discipline it demands, and the BIOSECURE Act’s commercial-channel gap. The law binds federal contractors and a short list of named companies, but a private pharmaceutical company can still license molecules, co-develop IP, and run discovery on Chinese AI platforms untouched by it. They 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.

The close is the hopeful one. Mapping a supply chain down to the raw material is possible today in a way it was not five years ago: big-data tools plus generative and agentic AI can surface hidden connections across vast datasets at a scale and speed no human team could. The problem is solvable, and the question is answerable.