In 2024, contract manufacturers WuXi Biologics and WuXi AppTec were catapulted into global consciousness as two of five Chinese service providers deemed a US national security threat in a draft for a new BIOSECURE Act.

While the final version of the law, signed by President Donald Trump in December 2025, was softer than the drafts and omitted specific company names, the US government does have a clear path to blacklist ‘companies of concern’ by the end of 2026.

However, WuXi’s story – one of meteoric growth, cut-throat competitiveness, and stern resilience – does not begin and end with BIOSECURE. Most significantly, WuXi has been – and continues to be – a major contributor to the growth of innovative Chinese biopharma, perhaps the most impactful industry story since the turn of the millennium.

This covers funding – WuXi and its various investment arms have been key early backers of companies including Adagene, CStone, DualityBio, D3 Bio, and Ocumension – and, perhaps even more importantly, talent.

The first generation of Chinese biotech founders were returnees, whose typical journey involved several years with Big Pharma in the US before starting their own companies amid China’s biotech boom of the early 2000s. However, WuXi has now emerged as one of the main proving grounds for many of the new cohort of Chinese biotech CEOs.

Since WuXi Biologics – which shares a founder with AppTec but which is owned and operated separately – was founded in 2010, it has become deeply entwined with the global biopharmaceutical industry.

The company employed 12,000 people across China, the US, Ireland, Germany, Singapore, and Qatar last year (although it has since divested its Irish operations), supporting 945 integrated client projects, including 74 in Phase III and 25 in commercial manufacturing.

It has become one of the go-to CDMOs for biologics manufacturing, ranked third globally for revenues, behind only Lonza and Samsung Biologics. Approximately one in five of all global novel biological entity IND applications go through WuXi, according to some estimates, while the firm’s 252 antibody drug conjugate (ADC) projects, astonishingly, represent something close to a third of the global ADC development pipeline.

WuXi’s ADC legacy was a direct influence on VelaVigo, a biotech which specialises in developing ADCs for multinational clients. The firm’s pipeline today includes ten multispecific antibody and ADC programmes across oncology and immunology, all positioned as first-in-class or best-in-class.

After building up experience as a research scientist at Pfizer and Novartis in the US, VelaVigo CEO Jing Li was lured back to China by WuXi in 2013, eventually rising to senior vice president of WuXi Biologics by the time he left to start his own outfit in 2021.

He explains that this was a complicated, but necessary, career move. “It involved a pay cut, a lifestyle shift, and separation from family who remained in the US. Colleagues questioned it, but I saw it as deliberate training. If my long-term goal was to build a biotech that could operate globally, I needed to learn China execution from the inside, under real commercial pressure.”

Jing, who met his VelaVigo co-founder Tong Zhang when they were both working at WuXi, explains that “WuXi was a very different operating environment from Big Pharma. The organisation ran with hard financial accountability and a strong commercial mindset. Senior leaders were expected to own business development, not outsource it. Performance was judged in simple terms: revenue and profit margin, quarter after quarter. That kind of clarity can feel harsh, but it forces discipline. WuXi was a training camp. It forced speed, accountability, and a practical understanding of how to align execution with commercial reality.”

Others have a similar tale to tell of “the WuXi school,” where efficiency, speed and lower costs combine to create a compelling value proposition. Xiaodun Mou (Susan) joined WuXi Biologics in 2015, two years after Jing, having worked on biologics development with Pfizer and then Merck (MSD globally) in the US. While at WuXi she founded the company’s Microbial and Viral Platforms (MVP) division, building a 1,000+-strong team from scratch, and eventually contributing to over ten percent of company revenues.

Based on this experience, in 2021, Mou was tapped up to join Shanghai-based gene editing start-up CorrectSequence Therapeutics (CorrectSeq) as CEO. Looking back, Mou feels that exposure to the wide range of projects being undertaken by WuXi, and the speed at which it accomplished them, has set her up well for company leadership.

“WuXi’s success largely stems from its ability to seize the moment and move quickly,” she opines. “Many of the Chinese biotech founders working on antibodies and ADCs were among our early clients. We adapted not only to provide services but also to innovate and develop technologies that could be practically applied to drug development.”

“When I left Merck, the development cycle from proof-of-concept to IND filing for monoclonal antibodies was about 24 months, which was considered very fast. At WuXi, under some special circumstances like the COVID mRNA vaccines, we brought that timeline down to six months, and more routinely now, under 12. That gave me the confidence to think about building something from scratch as I realised that I had developed the necessary capabilities.”

Even for WuXi alumni whose careers have been built entirely within China’s borders, their time with the company provided a crucial exposure to international standards. Zhao Wenxiang (Vincent), founder, chairman, and CEO at antibody discovery biotech Symray, for instance, explains taht WuXi’s positioning at the heart of China’s R&D boom in the 2010s provided valuable exposure to global best practice. Zhao credits working with the first wave of China biotech returnees from the US, first at GenScript and then at WuXi, as an inspiration to start his own company.

“At WuXi, we supported many of the world’s top 50 pharmaceutical companies through integrated R&D services,” explains Zhao. “That experience gave me not only technical depth, but also a clear understanding of how global drug development programmes are structured, evaluated, and commercialised. It ultimately laid the foundation for founding Symray in 2015, with the ambition of building a discovery engine that could operate at international standards from day one.”