Frontiers of Trade: Biology, national security and the border 

This is the fourth instalment of our  Frontiers of Trade  Policy series, which examines the places where international commerce is running ahead of the law meant to govern it. The first instalment asked which country owns a resource mined in space, the second asked who is liable when an autonomous AI agent, rather than a person, executes a trade; and the third whose verification counts at the border.  

This piece turns to biotechnology, where governments are increasingly treating biological capabilities as national-security assets. As the security border moves upstream from finished products to the data, IP, investment and research that create them, we ask whether the existing trade toolkit is equipped to govern what comes next. 

A European pharmaceutical company licenses a promising cancer molecule to a Chinese biotech company. The Chinese company agrees to fund its clinical development and manufacture the eventual treatment in China. No medicine was exported. No laboratory equipment changed hands. Nothing physical crossed a border. And yet governments are increasingly asking whether the transfer itself is a national security risk. 

That question is difficult to answer with the trade toolkit we have, because much of it was built to regulate identifiable transactions: a good crossing a border or a service being supplied. Export controls and investment-screening regimes can capture transfers of sensitive biotechnology, but what is under scrutiny in the deal above is hard to define – it is not simply the molecule, the licence or the investment, but the future capability the transaction could enable – something that governments are increasingly treating as a national security risk.  

The frontier is therefore not simply whether governments can control biological capability, but whether existing trade and investment frameworks can identify, assess and coordinate those interventions before the capability moves. 

Control moves upstream 

Biotechnology is being reclassified. Technologies once seen through the lens of healthcare, science and commercial innovation are now treated as strategic, sovereign capabilities, with a footprint far wider than medicine: engineering biology underpins agriculture, chemicals, materials, energy and defence. Washington has moved furthest, citing supply-chain dependence, technological competition and biosecurity as the drivers of tighter scrutiny. But this is not a US preoccupation alone: the UK places engineering biology alongside AI, semiconductors and quantum among its critical technologies, and the EU counts biotechnology among the technology areas posing the most sensitive economic-security risks. 

What matters for trade is what follows that designation. Controls are moving upstream from finished products to the knowledge, assets and relationships that create them: investment, licensing, research partnerships, genomic data and manufacturing know-how can all become objects of national security scrutiny before a product crosses a border. If biotechnology follows critical minerals or semiconductors, strategic status could bring increased scrutiny through investment screening, procurement preferences, technology-transfer controls and restrictions on data flows. The problem is that the trade system has no coherent framework for governing that shift. 

The governance vacuum 

Governments are not blind to this problem. The UK's Biological Security Strategy already seeks to balance security and resilience with innovation, investment and growth. The EU has similarly designated biotechnology a critical technology for economic security and proposed biosecurity measures and data controls under its Biotech Act. The US’s BIOSECURE and draft Biotech Acts go further towards restriction, using procurement, data and other national security controls. 

The gap is therefore not a lack of policy, but the absence of a common framework linking these different approaches to trade. 

• First, the security exception was not designed for this. GATT Article XXI¹, and its GATS equivalent, broadly give governments latitude to protect essential security interests. However, how those disciplines apply when the alleged security risk is not arms or a conventional military technology, but access to a biological capability, is difficult and nothing in the framework distinguishes a genuine security measure from industrial policy wearing a security label. 

• Second, biotechnology capabilities lack a mechanism for mutual recognition of national security assessments comparable to recognition arrangements found elsewhere in international economic regulation. Financial-services trade rules preserve governments’ ability to intervene for prudential reasons while allowing recognition of another country’s regulatory measures. In biotechnology, a security assessment made in London need not be recognised in Brussels or Washington, leaving no common framework for reconciling different judgements about the same capability. 

• Third, the object of control has escaped the categories. The Harmonised System classifies physical goods moving across borders. Sequence data, an IP licence, a research collaboration and a manufacturing partnership fit no code and cross no customs line. As with our previous Frontiers of Trade articles, which examined the question of origin in orbit and the conduct of autonomous trading agents, the thing being regulated has outrun the classification built to capture it. 

• Fourth, subsidy disciplines cannot tell security from protectionism. When the UK commits £2 billion over ten years to engineering biology, or the EU routes biomanufacturing through its Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform, is that a legitimate security measure or an actionable subsidy for a trade remedy investigation? Nothing currently answers the question. 

The contested asset: biological data 

Biotechnology adds a strategic asset with no obvious physical form: biological data. Genomic and multi-omic datasets train AI models, identify drug targets and accelerate discovery, so the advantage may sit less with whoever owns manufacturing capacity than with whoever can access the datasets used to design the next generation of products. 

The United States already treats biological data as a national security matter. Its Data Security Program, in force since 2025, restricts transactions that would give countries of concern access to bulk genomic, biometric and health data, and the Department of Justice describes the regime, in its own words, as effectively export controls for data (whereas the EU has relied principally on its General Data Protection Regulation regime).  

The same intangible object is claimed at the same time by a second set of regimes pulling in the opposite direction. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity’s multilateral mechanism for digital sequence information, and its associated Cali Fund, companies making commercial use of sequence data are expected to pay into a benefit-sharing pot; the fund is live and has taken its first contributions. The WHO Pandemic Agreement’s pathogen access and benefit-sharing system, still under negotiation, would attach similar sharing obligations to pathogen sequence data. A WIPO treaty adopted in 2024, not yet in force, would add a patent-disclosure layer for inventions derived from genetic resources. 

So, one regime says lock this data down as a security asset; another says share it, and share the benefits from it, as an obligation; and the trade system, which sees no border crossing and holds no code for the data, reconciles neither. The asset at the centre of the next phase of biotech competition is now governed by almost everything except the system built to govern cross-border exchange. 

What businesses should do 

The practical implication is that a company can no longer identify its geopolitical exposure by asking what it exports. The exposure sits upstream. 

• Map strategic dependencies, not simply suppliers. Exposure runs across active ingredients, biomanufacturing, sequencing, cloud and data infrastructure, research partners and critical IP, not just the finished products a firm ships. In generic medicines, the point is already concrete: China controls the key starting materials for the overwhelming majority of several essential drugs, so downstream diversification offers no protection when the upstream input is a single choke point. 

• Treat biological data as controlled technology, and note the double exposure. The same genomic and multiomic datasets can attract security controls on one side and benefit-sharing claims on the other. Both need to be understood before data is stored, accessed or transferred across a border, or to a counterparty.  

• Screen transactions earlier. Licensing agreements, joint ventures and clinical collaborations increasingly attract the scrutiny once reserved for acquisitions and exports. The diligence has to move to the point of the deal, not the point of shipment.  

• Engage before the perimeter hardens. This matters most for the UK and EU. The enacted US BIOSECURE restrictions on federal contracting with designated biotechnology companies, and the Data Security Program’s controls on bulk biological data, mark a clear direction of travel. If Washington’s approach begins to shape allied policy, businesses have a short window to influence where the security border is drawn rather than simply comply with it once it is fixed. 

The border moves to the deal 

Return to the Chinese company licensing the cancer molecule. What looks like a single commercial transaction can now attract scrutiny from several directions: the licence and IP transfer, access to biological data, the investment behind the deal and the eventual manufacturing partnership. None requires a finished medicine to cross a customs border, but each could increasingly fall within a national security regime. 

That is the shift biotechnology presents for trade. Governments no longer need to wait for a product to reach the border before intervening; scrutiny can begin much earlier, when the technology, data or know-how changes hands. The border, in effect, has moved to the deal itself. 

George Riddell is a Senior Advisor specialised in supporting clients in international trade, sustainable supply chains and geopolitical fragmentation. Beth Sizeland is a former UK Deputy National Security Adviser and leads Flint's crisis resilience work. Kathryn Watson is a Director in Flint's trade and market access team 

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