By Jason Campagna, CMO of Q32 Bio, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC
We’re entering a phase shift in biotech—one that extends beyond molecules, pipelines, or even platforms. Tariff escalations, supply chain fractures, and a reassertion of industrial policy are reshaping the terrain beneath us. The scrutiny and legislative backlash against WuXi AppTec—one of the world’s largest CDMOs—has brought into public view what many in the industry have long navigated quietly, that biotechnology’s foundational reliance on globally integrated supply chains is no longer politically or operationally stable.
The WuXi case is not an outlier—it’s a signal. U.S. policymakers are now treating biotech the way they’ve come to treat semiconductors and energy: as strategic infrastructure. Input costs, regulatory pathways, and even contractual viability are being reinterpreted through the lens of national interest. In this context, “free trade” is no longer a default assumption.
From my perch within the Atlas ecosystem, and through conversations across its portfolio companies, I’m seeing clear signs of transition. Biologics pipelines increasingly feature bispecifics, trispecifics, and ADCs built not only for biological sophistication but for differentiated deployment—exemplified by Pheon Therapeutics, which recently raised $120M to advance next-generation ADCs into the clinic. At the same time, Chinese-origin NMEs are flowing into U.S. portfolios at a striking pace. Hercules, a spinout of Hengrui Pharmaceuticals backed by Atlas and others, raised $400M in one of the largest cross-border biotech launches to date.
And while these capital movements accelerate, state-aligned instruments—such as the Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital—are treating biotechnology with the same strategic framing once reserved for semiconductors or defense platforms. The terrain is shifting, and the signals are becoming harder to ignore. ARPA-H’s decision to locate its Investor Catalyst Hub in Cambridge, Massachusetts further underscores this shift—placing national strategic infrastructure for health innovation directly within one of biotech’s most active ecosystems. It reflects a broader reality: the government is no longer just a funder of innovation. It is becoming a platform builder, aligning capital and geography to accelerate translation and resilience.
Biotech’s Infrastructure Moment
Change is already underway—but our frameworks for value, relevance, and readiness haven’t fully caught up. Biotech has traditionally been framed as a domain of therapeutic innovation: a source of breakthrough medicines, investor returns, and occasionally, public-private collaboration. But that framing is incomplete for the decade ahead. We are shifting from a world that valued therapeutic novelty in isolation to one that prioritizes stability, deployment, and sovereign readiness.
Just as the CHIPS Act reframed semiconductors as infrastructure, and the IRA did the same for energy systems, we are now witnessing the early architecture of what might become the bio-industrial policy era. Agencies like BARDA, ARPA-H, and CEPI are not simply funding science—they are funding capabilities. The core question is shifting: not just what can you discover, but what can you deploy?
We’re already seeing this play out. Nimbus Therapeutics has leveraged modular drug discovery and computational chemistry platforms that align with DARPA- and BARDA-style interests in scalable, rapid-response therapeutic development. Meanwhile, Moderna’s ongoing CEPI partnerships—including pre-pandemic commitments to rapidly produce mRNA vaccines in LMICs—demonstrate how platform readiness, not just innovation, is being treated as public health infrastructure. And through ARPA-H, we’re beginning to see a new funding model that prioritizes translational velocity and technical risk: programs like NITRO (Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration and Organoids) or the use of rapid manufacturing hubs are explicitly designed to create deployable biotech toolkits—not just advance single-asset R&D.
These emerging funding models share a common thesis: that the value of a biotech platform lies not only in its novelty, but in its readiness—its ability to scale, deploy, and operate under constraint. But in practice, many of the most promising therapeutic modalities—particularly RNA-based platforms—remain fragile and logistically intensive. This creates a strategic blind spot: we are investing in innovation faster than we are building the systems to reliably deliver it. What’s missing is a capability layer beneath the molecule. A kind of infrastructure that enables biologics to function not just in ideal settings—but in conflict zones, LMICs, and heat-stressed geographies.
Think of it as a capability stack: at the top sits the therapeutic innovation itself—the siRNA, mRNA, or biologic payload. Beneath that lies formulation science, packaging design, and delivery hardware. And at the foundation are the supply chain dynamics: how therapies are stored, transported, and accessed across geographies. When any layer is unstable, the entire stack is vulnerable. Today, too much of biotech is built on assumptions that only hold in centralized, well-resourced environments. If we want RNA and advanced biologics to fulfill their global promise, we need to invest in the foundational layers that make them operable under stress.
Stability as a Service: A Missing Layer
RNA-based therapeutics exemplify this new duality. mRNA, siRNA, and related modalities have massive potential, but remain constrained by cold-chain fragility, complex manufacturing, and delivery limitations.
That constraint is an opportunity. What we need is a new operational layer: “Stability as a Service” (SaaS). SaaS, in this context, is the development of modular capabilities that enable nucleic acid therapeutics to be deployed under stress—heat, logistics, time, and geopolitics. These include lyophilized formulations, non-cryogenic delivery systems, and packaging designed for decentralized distribution.
SaaS is not just a formulation problem—it’s a strategic lever:
- Global equity: enabling therapeutic access in LMICs without centralized infrastructureDefense readiness: platform vaccines and antivirals for use in conflict or outbreak zonesClimate resilience: robust delivery in unstable supply chains and temperature-volatile environments
We are approaching a world where the “formulation layer” becomes just as strategic as the API itself.
Three Signals, Three Layers of the Stack
If biotech’s next phase will be shaped not just by what we discover, but by how we deploy it, then the strategic advantage will lie in mastering a new capability stack. Several companies already signal the growing importance of this architecture:
- Comanche Biopharma is developing a novel siRNA therapeutic for preeclampsia, with a delivery profile that may one day function outside of cold-chain environments. While the lead program is still in development, the deeper signal is this: if the team succeeds in building a thermostable, infrastructure-light RNA delivery system, it could represent a foundational shift in how biotech engages with LMICs, fragile states, or climate-stressed geographies. This is the base layer of the stack—deployability, logistics, and readiness under constraint.Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary, recently raised $600M to advance its mission of using AI to transform drug discovery. But the true innovation isn’t just computational—it’s architectural. Isomorphic is building a design platform that operates across therapeutic areas, compressing discovery timelines while enabling scalability and iteration. This is the middle layer: a flexible, data-driven operating system that expands the reach and speed of therapeutic development across institutional and national boundaries.Tierra Biosciences, a Material Impact portfolio company, offers high-throughput, on-demand protein synthesis via a cloud-based e-commerce model. Their platform reduces friction in biological research and development—especially in decentralized or resource-limited settings. It’s a quiet but radical innovation in how we access biological inputs. Tierra represents a rethinking of biotech’s manufacturing and input infrastructure—part of the base layer that determines who gets to build, iterate, and respond in real time.
Together, these companies signal a broader redefinition of biotech—not just as a generator of novel molecules, but as a builder of resilient, scalable systems. The future may depend not only on discovery—but on the structures we build beneath it.
From Signals to Structure: Two Case Studies
If the companies above suggest where the field is heading, the next examples make the path and direction explicit. These aren’t signals—they are structural commitments. Both Resilience and Laronde have moved beyond singular product ambition and are actively building the infrastructure that could define biotech’s next operating system. Each embodies a distinct philosophy: one focused on manufacturing sovereignty, the other on platform endurance. Taken together, they highlight the emerging belief that biotech’s long-term relevance may depend as much on systems architecture as on scientific novelty.
Resilience and the Productization of Capacity
Resilience, backed by ARCH Venture Partners, is perhaps the clearest example of biotech’s infrastructural turn. Rather than focusing on therapeutics, Resilience builds distributed, modular GMP manufacturing capacity as a platform. In doing so, it reframes biomanufacturing as a service layer—akin to AWS for biotech—where scale, speed, and sovereign flexibility become core capabilities. It is a vivid demonstration that infrastructure itself can be a strategic asset, not just a supporting function.
Laronde and the Challenge of Sustained RNA
Flagship Pioneering’s Laronde is developing “endless RNA” (eRNA), a programmable RNA platform with extended durability. But the promise of persistent, systemic expression raises a fundamental question: how do we deliver and control such a molecule across diverse clinical and logistical environments? The technology is bold—but its success may hinge not only on the biology, but on the infrastructure that surrounds it. Laronde illustrates that as RNA therapeutics evolve in sophistication, their dependency on robust deployment systems only intensifies.
Why Now
This isn’t an abstract forecast. Recent policy developments are clarifying the stakes. The next wave of tariffs and trade policy—particularly around China—will implicate APIs, excipients, reagents, and packaging materials essential to biotech manufacturing. Add to this the rising scrutiny around CMO geography, sovereign biomanufacturing, and dual-use technology, and the message becomes clear: biotech is entering the strategic domain once occupied by energy and defense. And with that shift comes opportunity: for access to new pools of capital, for advanced market commitments, for blended public-private partnership models that reward infrastructure alongside innovation.
Why Me
I don’t write this as an academic observer or policy analyst—I write as someone who, like many in this field, has spent years inside the system, leading development efforts while navigating firsthand the intersections of infrastructure, geopolitics, and clinical urgency. These experiences don’t make me unique—but they’ve made the patterns harder to ignore.
Earlier in my career at The Medicines Company (MDCO), I wasn’t just involved in product development—I was part of an effort to build a scalable operating model for how innovation could be embedded into high-acuity health systems. MDCO’s ambition extended beyond launching therapies like Angiomax or Cleviprex. The company sought to solve the diffusion problem in modern therapeutics: how to institutionalize change, not just individual prescriptions. Through strategic frameworks like the “nine-box model,” modular rollout strategies, and global playbooks tailored to hospital behavior, we aimed to make therapeutic adoption as programmable as therapeutic discovery.
Ironically, the company’s name—“The Medicines Development Company”—wasn’t about molecules alone. It reflected a vision for drug development as a platform discipline: repeatable, systems-aware, and built to scale under constraint. That experience reshaped how I see the field today. Formulation, delivery, and integration aren’t downstream of innovation—they are innovation. And whether in antibiotics or RNA, it’s often the infrastructure, not the science, that determines reach. This essay reflects that shift—not from the outside in, but from the inside out.
Conclusion: The Opportunity of Convergence
The infrastructure layer of biotech is no longer secondary. It’s becoming the stage on which scientific, economic, and geopolitical pressures collide. Tariffs, trade restrictions, and the fracturing of long-assumed global supply routes are accelerating—not hypothetically, but right now.
None of this diminishes the core value of biotech’s traditional model: founding and funding therapeutics, advancing human health, and delivering breakthrough science. That work remains essential—and in this regard, Atlas has consistently backed companies that push the frontier of science with rigor, focus, and a deep understanding of what it takes to bring a therapeutic to life. But the context around that excellence is changing.
What does this mean for our industry? For how we build companies in the next decade? For the types of founders, funders, and platforms that will define the next era? These aren’t rhetorical questions—they’re live ones. And they’re thrilling to consider.
This essay has raised the possibility that companies who invest early—into stability, logistics, and delivery—won’t just lead clinically. They’ll be the ones still standing when the context shifts, the ones partners and policymakers turn to when deployment becomes the bottleneck. This isn’t about speculative preparedness. It’s about staying relevant in a world that is reorganizing beneath our feet. And that moment is already here.
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