Christopher Swift on China Biotech Crackdown – ‘There’ll be more self-initiated serious investigations into these kinds of transactions’
Foley & Lardner LLP partner Christopher Swift assessed the potential impact of the BIOSECURE Act – aimed at banning trade with major Chinese biotechnology firms – in the Axios article, “What the China biotech crackdown means for deals,”
“There’ll be more self-initiated serious investigations into these kinds of transactions,” Swift said, nothing that this flurry of legislative activity is chilling interest in the space.
When asked whether the Biden administration’s focus on reviewing foreign investment deals involving biotechnology is an overreach, Swift highlighted that the transfer of U.S. information, especially health care information, to Chinese parties is a “major concern.”
“You’ve got to weigh two sides of the coin here. It’s either the foreign investment dollars that could enable research here in the U.S. on one side, or, the risk of, effectively IP leakage to foreign countries,” he explained. “The risk of losing that IP to foreign countries is greater than the benefit we would gain from those foreign investment dollars.”
As more pharmaceutical companies are out-licensing to Chinese firms to develop and commercialize cancer drugs and other therapies, Swift said that given the heightened scrutiny on data security, “if human clinical trial data is involved in those deals, Uncle Sam is going to have an interest in knowing about it.”
“In the cases that I’ve defended, Chinese access to Phase 3 and Phase 4 clinical data…has been a major focus of attention,” he added.
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