There’s still time for the Senate to Fix the BIOSECURE Act 

By Rade Drmanac

This week, the House of Representatives made the unfortunate decision to prioritize geopolitics over market healthy competition and innovation for U.S. biotech researchers by passing the BIOSECURE Act. While we’re deeply disappointed, we’re not entirely surprised, especially in a presidential election year.  

Now it’s up to the Senate in the final months of this legislative session to fix this broken bill, which Rep. Jim McGovern described in a letter to his House colleagues as setting “a dangerous precedent going forward for companies that find themselves listed in this bill – or any other similar legislation.”  

In its current form, the BIOSECURE Act forces lawmakers to pick winners and losers by naming companies to ban from the U.S. market, including our company, Complete Genomics. This piecemeal approach to legislation would leave large swaths of personal DNA data held by companies not named in the bill unprotected while wrongly targeting some companies that don’t have access to this data at all. Targeting individual companies isn’t the right way to protect genetic data and it may actually violate the Constitution.  

The irony is that because we care about data security, we’re advocating for Congress to fix this bill, even though our company has no business being included in it at all, as we’re a manufacturer of sequencing machines with no access to the data our customers generate on them. A better approach would treat all companies with access to this data equally through a proper review process, ensuring that American genetic data remains secure regardless of who collects it. 

The largest impact of the BIOSECURE Act would be felt by U.S. researchers and the healthcare consumers that benefit from their breakthroughs. Disrupting the genomics industry supply chain and ecosystem will delay critical research in areas such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, and further concentrate an already-concentrated market, leading to fewer choices, higher prices, and less innovation. As written, BIOSECURE would put U.S. genomics scientists and patients at a distinct disadvantage compared to the rest of the world, where researchers have free reign to choose cost-effective, speedy and flexible research tools. 

The good news: there is still time for the Senate to fix the BIOSECURE Act which poses dire consequences for American researchers and healthcare consumers.