Exiger CEO Brandon Daniels at the World Economy Summit

Well, the conference has been amazing, and there's a lot of talk about how we're going to handle our biotechnology future. But the momentum and catalyst that the pandemic was for fervor around biotechnology diversity, scale-up of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and PPE being reshored either to allies or the United States lost steam, as all things do, because it got eroded by the day-to-day requirement to provide care to hundreds of millions of people. So what you've seen over the last few years, despite EO1417 efforts to design better supply chains, is a lack of steam to increase our strategic national stockpile, increase diversity of supply, and create an organic industrial base. There's been a lack of real fervor in reshoring pharmaceutical API and excipient production, which is not actually that hard to do. It just doesn't have the underlying investment because the current solution is technically working, and that's left us more fragile than we ever were, and it hasn't solved the underlying problems we saw during the COVID-19 response. Exiger was the technology utilized to map all supply chains across all 30 critical medical sectors where we had purchased $7 billion of PPE, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and treatments, and the routing of vaccines. During that process, for instance with ventilators, we identified that all the commodity ventilators that Ford, Bloom Energy, GM, and the DoD with L3 Harris were going to produce all relied on the same solenoid valve producer, a small company in Italy. We spoke to the CEO, and he said, 'Look, I'm not going to scale up production because I need a 10-year commitment that you need more of these solenoid valves. And by the way, I sit in the middle of Italy, one of the hardest-hit countries from a pandemic perspective. I don't have anyone at work.' Those kinds of challenges we haven't done a lot to fix. So there's a resurgence of potential investment into US biotechnology, and hopefully that starts to make a difference.

There was a report that just came out, joined with our report, around our severe dependence issues on foreign APIs and pharmaceuticals to provide cost-effective healthcare. That report was by the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, a congressional report that highlighted the major investments we need to revive the US biotechnology industry. It happened at the same time that tariffs started to focus acutely on the potential need to reshore our pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Since that report and the tariff saber-rattling, we've seen over $170 billion of investment from Roche, AbbVie, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson in US production capabilities. So there is a role for government in incentivization, regulation, and creating awareness to reset the stage for what's economically viable in the US. Through AI and automation, it's actually quite cost-effective now to make it in the US because labor arbitrage is very thin, and real estate in North Texas is cheaper than in Shenzhen or parts of India. With regulatory incentives and deregulation to build factories, and a global economy relying on automation and robotics, we can have a competitive pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and PPE industry in the US that's economically sound. You only need a sliver of tariffs to incentivize that activity. We've seen it happen in multiple industries, like China moving manufacturing to Vietnam after tariffs were imposed.