‘America First’ Requires A Strong Biotech Industry
This column by Palmetto Promise President & CEO Wendy Damron was originally published in FitsNews.
When most Americans think of biotech and the Carolinas, they immediately imagine North Carolina and its famous “Research Triangle” hub of labs and universities. But increasingly, they ought to take some advice from the billboards dotting I-95 — and look “south of the border.”
That’s because the Palmetto State’s biotech industry is undergoing an unprecedented boom. It’s now South Carolina’s fastest-growing sector, having added over 6,000 jobs since 2017. Statewide, more than 1,000 life sciences firms now employ nearly 90,000 workers.
But whether this growth continues depends, in large part, on whether Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott can convince President Donald Trump to rethink a proposal that’d deter research investments and gut our biotech industry.
President Trump recently issued a “Most-Favored-Nation” executive order that lays the groundwork for capping U.S. brand-name drug prices at the lowest prices charged for the same medicines in other developed countries.
Senator Graham applauded the president’s good intentions. And he echoed the White House’s complaints that foreign countries are freeloading off of American research investments — by imposing price controls that result in cheaper medicines at the expense of snuffing out their own drug industries.
He’s absolutely right that Americans shouldn’t have to disproportionately shoulder the world’s research burden.
But copying other countries’ price controls isn’t the solution. It’d merely import the same destruction — and loss of drugs and, ultimately, patients’ lives — here.
One recent study found that MFN-style pricing could slash the number of new drugs developed by emerging biotech companies by up to 90%, hitting areas like oncology and neurology especially hard. Another analysis estimated that such price controls would prevent the development of 167 to 342 new medicines over two decades, collectively shaving anywhere from 476 million to 977 million years off of American patients’ lives.
We’ve already seen this play out in European countries, which used to dominate the global drug industry, but gradually destroyed their domestic biotech sectors by imposing ever-stricter price controls. Germany alone invented 20% of the world’s new drugs in the 1970s. By the 2000s, that had dropped to just 6%.
Of course, European countries don’t merely freeload off America when it comes to drug development — they do it for defense too. As Sen. Graham recently noted, Germany and other NATO allies have “hollowed out” their militaries to the point where it’s questionable whether they’re even capable of defending their own continent without U.S. help. Germany’s military, in particular, was less combat-ready at the beginning of this year than at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over three years ago, according to one recent report.
Only recently, with President Trump’s return to office, has the situation begun to improve. President Trump, backed by Sen. Graham and other defense hawks, have told European countries in no uncertain terms that the chronic underinvestment in their militaries must end.
And the Europeans are listening. Germany, for instance, just acquiesced to Trump’s demand that NATO members ultimately spend 5% of their GDP on defense — which would entail Germany more than doubling its military budget.
There’s no reason why we can’t use the same leverage to demand our allies pull their weight when it comes to drug research and development. “It’s time for the rest of the developed world to share in the costs” of developing lifesaving new medicines, Sen. Graham recently said.
South Carolina has quietly become a leader in the life sciences. But to keep that momentum, our senators must steer the president toward reforms that eliminate foreign freeloading — while preserving drug development in the Palmetto State.
