Heard on the Floor at NSCEB: Insights, Analysis & Recommendations on the Just-released National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology

By Mark Warner, CEO, Liberation Labs
Special to the Digest

On April 10, 2025 in Washington, the NSCEB released its final report to Congress and hosted a day-long convening of leaders from industry, government, and academia. I was there, and the mood was a mix of excitement and realism: bold ideas—like $15B in proposed funding—were welcomed, but tempered by the challenges we’ve seen before.

The report outlines six priority areas: setting national strategy, scaling innovation, defense integration, staying ahead of global competitors, and workforce development. These are the right focus areas. But as Caitlin Frazer, Executive Director of NSCEB, put it plainly: “We have time to act, but no time to wait.”

The gap between ambition and execution is real—and dangerous.

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “China now outspends the United States in biotech research and development (R&D) and leads the world in areas like synthetic biology…..China has dramatically increased its biotech investments, with biopharma R&D growing 400-fold and the market value of biotech firms surging 100-fold between 2016 to 2021, now reaching a collective value of $300 billion.”

As China accelerates its biotech investments with strategic intent, the U.S. risks ceding leadership not because of lack of innovation, but because of lack of action.

Manufacturing—or just talking about it?

In addition to the gap between ambition and action, one of the other striking gaps in the report is that between the stressed importance of commercial biomanufacturing and a clear, scalable path for making it happen in the U.S. The word “manufacturing” appears often, but is frequently clarified to mean pilot or pre-commercial scale-up—not actual, industrial production.

That’s a problem.

We need to be honest about what we mean when we say “manufacturing.” In any industrial sector, that means:

1. A business producing and selling real products
   2. A business producing and selling real products in commercial volumes (think: TRL 7 and up)

Until policy, strategy, and investment align around that definition, we’ll continue to fall short—while patting ourselves on the back for marginal progress and risk giving the false impression that the issue is already solved.

The first step is admitting the problem

Multiple participants raised the lack of U.S. biomanufacturing capacity. Edward Shenderovich, CEO of Synonym, said it best: “The state of U.S. biomanufacturing is bleak.”

He’s right. The U.S. still lacks even a single multi-use, industrial-scale contract fermentation facility—the kind required to actually produce what US biotechnology companies invent.

That’s the gap Liberation Labs is working to fill with our Richmond facility. But this is just one project. A robust bioeconomy needs many more—fast—and the resources, policies, and urgency to support them.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way

As John Cumbers, Founder of SynBioBeta, aptly stated in his op-ed: “If we fail to build the capacity to make what we invent, we’ll watch the returns on American innovation flow abroad.”

This scenario has unfolded before in sectors like solar, semiconductors, and nuclear energy. We pioneered the innovations but allowed manufacturing to migrate overseas. Biotechnology is on the brink of a similar fate.

Where we go from here

We appreciate the work of NSCEB and the urgency reflected in their recommendations. But this report is only a starting point. Without a clear and immediate plan to scale commercial biomanufacturing infrastructure, the U.S. will continue to lose ground.

Liberation is proud to be building part of the solution. But it will take more than one company—it will take coordination, capital, and courage to lead where it matters most: not just inventing the future, but building it here at home.

Mark Warner is co-founder and CEO of Liberation Labs, which is building a commercial-scale contract biomanufacturing facility in Richmond, Indiana.