Inside a cavernous convention hall in Paris in late October, thousands of students gathered for the latest biotechnology Olympics. 

The event, called the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM), is unknown to most yet revered in the brainy world of synthetic biology. Each year, more than 5,000 participants from high schools and universities around the world spend the summer mulling biological problems and how they might be solved through bioengineering. They then descend on Paris in the fall to decide whose idea is best. 

Proposals range from the ingenious to the wacky. One team developed a new enzyme to eradicate indoor mold. Another had an idea for a weight-loss yogurt that could replace Ozempic shots. A third developed a cost-effective trap for bedbugs, using artificial sweat to lure them. 

The inventive dreams of synthetic biologists can be transformative. Synthetic biology is responsible for the mRNA vaccines that inoculated millions during the Covid pandemic. Other researchers are developing man-made blood, as well as carbon-capture technologies that could trap methane, which contributes to global warming, and turn it into usable products. 

The annual contest was the brainchild of Randy Rettburg, Tom Knight and Drew Endy when the three scientists were all at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has become a proving ground for some of the most talented young people in biotech. Just as importantly, iGEM is a powerful magnet for drawing even more prospective talent into the field. Many leading scientists are alumni of the competition, which is in its 22nd year and has attracted more than 100,000 participants since its founding. That also makes the event a window on to the industry’s future, and an opportunity to meet some of the people taking it there. 

Increasingly, that future is looking Chinese. 

At the world Olympiads in physics, biology and chemistry — each of which caps attendance by country — Chinese contestants were mostly tied with their U.S. rivals for the most gold medals this year. But at iGEM, where attendance is open to anyone with the means to attend, Chinese teams are poised for domination.

This year, approximately half of the 400 teams were from China (including Hong Kong). In the high school division, 100 of 144 registered teams came from China, compared to America’s 14. Chinese high school teams accounted for seven of the top 10 teams this year. The U.S. accounted for one. 

The trend is in keeping with a seismic shift in the broader biotech industry: China’s steady ascendance as a biotech power. Once dismissed as copycats and outsourcers, Chinese biotech companies are increasingly being recognized as engines of innovation. One-third of the world’s clinical trials this year were conducted in China. Shares in Chinese biotech companies have risen, on average, 110 percent in 2025, compared to roughly 30 percent for their Western counterparts. 

Cultivation of talent has been instrumental to the rise of China’s biotech industry. Previous generations of talented Chinese scholars gravitated to the U.S., UK and other countries to study the sciences. Today, China’s top scientific minds are increasingly being trained at home. In some cases, bright young people are traveling in the other direction.

LE GRAND JAMBOREE

To understand how China’s all-out effort to cultivate scientific talent is unfolding in its universities and high schools, The Wire China attended this year’s iGEM competition, known as the Grand Jamboree. We started with a walk around the competition floor with Endy, the iGEM co-founder, now a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. 

The tour started with a conversation about fish odor. 

Trimethylaminuria, or TMAU, is a metabolic disorder that causes its sufferers to smell like fish. The syndrome is rare, affecting perhaps one in 200,000 people worldwide, but debilitating. Those cursed with it often endure social isolation and a cascade of mental health challenges stemming from their inability to control their scent.

In 2023, a group of students from Florida State University came to iGEM with a proposed remedy: a probiotic (or healthy bacteria) that would counter-act TMAU’s symptoms. “The idea began with the 2023 FSU [iGEM] team,” says Zachary Asarnow, a senior at Florida State. “Then we came back in 2024, won a gold medal for our work, and decided to start a company.” 

That company, Esperance Healthcare, is working towards getting its probiotic approved as a dietary supplement by the Food and Drug Administration.

“It’s a really good example of how you simply don’t know what synthetic biology can do,” says Endy. “These are well-intentioned kids trying to solve real-world problems. There are 400 more teams just like them.” 

When iGEM was founded in 2003, the idea was to use a competition as a way to get young people interested in and excited about synthetic biology, which at the time was still a nascent field. Synthetic biology focuses on the use of engineering principles to design and build biological solutions to solve problems. What computer code is to software engineers, DNA is to synthetic biologists who ‘re-write’ nature’s blueprint to instruct biological systems to perform specific tasks.

These days, the vast majority of the funding in synthetic biology goes towards treating diseases. But investors have also helped fund a smattering of other interesting applications. California-based Antheia, for example, is using synthetic biology to accelerate the production of Narcan, the nasal spray used to treat drug overdoses, by slashing the time needed to make a key ingredient from years to days. Another company, Germany-based AMSilk, combines e. Coli with spider silk to produce biodegradable fibers for Adidas running shoes. 

One of the best known applications of synthetic biology is genetically modified organisms (GMOs). In the 1980s, scientists in Europe developed Golden Rice, a genetically modified rice variety engineered to produce a chemical convertible by the human body into vitamin A. It was a revolutionary technology that proponents believe has the potential to save millions of lives.

But the idea of messing around with DNA scared the public, and the technology was quickly met with suspicion from environmentalists and regulators. Even China, which was an early adopter of GMO crops in the late 1980s, made a sharp U-turn on GMOs amid public opposition. To date, no country has permitted Golden Rice to be produced on a commercial scale.

After GMOs, the sector also suffered from a misadventure into biofuels. In the late-2000s, with oil prices above $100 a barrel, venture capitalists poured billions into synthetic biology companies that had devised ways to make synthetic petroleum from sugar and microbes. But as oil prices crashed in successive years, those projects became uncompetitive versus regular fuel. Many of the projects failed and investors recoiled from the sector.

As a way to get college students excited about biology and combat negative impressions of the field, a distinct feature of iGEM going back to its inception is that it’s supposed to be fun. The competition’s official mascot, Gemy, is a human-sized germ. As The Wire China’s correspondent wandered the convention floor, he was accosted by a teenager in a full-body bedbug costume who slapped a sticker on his shirt. “You’ve been infested,” the student-bug said cheerfully. “Come to our booth to find out how to be treated.” 

Intrigued by this ingenious bit of marketing, The Wire China went to booth H6. There, students from United Christian College (Kowloon East), a public school in Hong Kong, showed how they had devised a way to lure bedbugs, which the subtropical city has in abundance. They did so by artificially producing L-lactic acid, a chemical naturally produced by humans and known to attract the bugs, using genetically modified E. coli bacteria. 

The Hong Kong students admitted, however, that they had not tested their invention on actual bedbugs. iGEM imposes strict rules on the kinds of practical experimentation students can do, particularly at the high school level. The rules include strict oversight over the use of hazardous organisms, human experimentation and animal use. 

In practice, it means that some iGEM projects are unrealistic. A high school team from South Korea, for example, proposed an ingestible alternative to semaglutide, the multibillion-dollar weight loss medication more commonly known as Ozempic or Wegovy, using a protein derived from probiotics. It is an intriguing idea but also one unlikely to be ready for clinical trials anytime soon — pharma companies have invested billions to develop a pill for Ozempic, so far unsuccessfully.

Some iGEM projects do become promising real life solutions. Esperance, the start-up founded by the students from FSU, is working towards a trial of its treatment for fish odor syndrome in humans. Another startup, Averra, is developing ‘biosensors’ that help farmers manage soil health. The company was founded in 2024 by a group of ex-iGEMers from Boston University. 

It used to be that the U.S. had more scientifically trained biotech hands than China. That is no longer true.

Jason Kelly, Chief Executive, Ginkgo Bioworks

The first company established by iGEM participants, Ginkgo Bioworks, went public in 2021. Ginkgo trades under the ticker DNA and develops tools to support synthetic biology research, offering labs, software and a library of genetic parts and data. This month the company was awarded a $47 million contract from the Department of Energy to build an ‘autonomous lab’ at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which automates lots of the grunt work traditionally done manually by scientists in the lab. In doing so, Ginkgo hopes to bring down costs and make the U.S. competitive in biotech research again.

“The way we’ve [historically] done bioengineering is at the lab bench with our hands,” says Jason Kelly, Ginkgo’s chief executive. “But you know what’s cheaper in China? Hands.

“This is the reason why so much of the early-stage biopharma industry is going there,” he adds. “It used to be that the U.S. had more scientifically trained biotech hands than China. That is no longer true. My view is if the U.S. wants to keep early stage biotech and research, you’ve got to automate it.”

CHINA AT iGEM 

Chinese teams first began participating at iGEM in 2007, a year after Beijing incorporated synthetic biology into its national high-tech R&D program, also known as Program 863. The inclusion was the first of several major initiatives by the Chinese government to emphasize the importance of biotechnology in its industrial policy. 

The Chinese government’s moves to promote synthetic biology had overseas help, thanks to people such as Endy. The charismatic professor had gained minor celebrity status in the mid-2000s for synthetic biology research, winning awards such as Esquire’s “75 most influential people of the 21st century.” 

At the height of U.S.-China engagement about 20 years ago, Endy was dispatched to China by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the congressionally-chartered scientific advisory body, to spread the word about his field. In 2013, he was involved in a trilateral partnership with the UK and China to develop a 20-year roadmap for the global biotech sector. 

“I was trusted with going to China to promote biotechnology,” says Endy. Wryly, he adds: “I succeeded.”

iGEM alumni were involved in the effort as well, including scientists who have since become luminaries in the industry. John Cumbers, a British molecular biologist and chief executive of SynBioBeta, the industry’s largest annual conference, and Patrick Cai, a professor of synthetic genomics at the University of Manchester, traveled to China to recruit the first four Chinese iGEM teams. Cai is also the co-founder of a research center at China’s National Gene Bank, which was developed in partnership with the Beijing Genome Institute (BGI), China’s leading genomics company.

Within five years of the first teams joining iGEM, more than a dozen Chinese universities had signed up. Entrants grew further in 2011 after iGEM added a high school division. While U.S. participation plateaued at around 70 teams in the mid-2010s, the number of Chinese entrants continued to expand, reaching over 200 teams this year. 

A key determinant of who gets to go to iGEM is financial support. Funding a team’s research and travel can require tens of thousands of dollars, a price tag that several European teams told The Wire China is increasingly prohibitive. 

Students from the University of Ioannina in Greece wore matching polos with so many sponsor logos that they looked like a Formula One pit crew. They said it had cost about €20,000 ($23,000) to bring their 16-member team to Paris. Their local government had contributed a few thousand euros, while local businesses pitched in a few hundred euros each.

Another team, from the University of Muenster in Germany, had to scrounge for money to attend. With a meager subsidy from their university, they relied on in-kind donations and sponsorship from a local bank. A Muenster student fretted that they were leaving nothing in reserve for next year’s participants. 

By comparison, students from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Anhui province said they had little difficulty fundraising, receiving about 100,000 yuan ($14,000) from their department. A team from the University of Hong Kong was similarly provided for. Their expenses were fully covered.

FSU’s Asarnow said his university covered “pretty much 100 percent” of his team’s iGEM costs. FSU, Florida’s flagship public university, recently launched an ambitious initiative to improve healthcare in the state, receiving a $125 million investment from the state legislature. Florida’s new Institute for Pediatric Rare Diseases also gave the students a $30,000 grant to help turn their iGEM idea for treating fish odor syndrome into a healthcare startup. 

For some high school students, cost is less of an obstacle. A growing number of “third-party institutions” — including after-school tutoring companies — are paying to attend the competition. 

“There is a whole private-sector pipeline for getting kids into iGEM,” says Cumbers. “These are often rich kids whose schools don’t have the resources or lab space, so they go to a private firm.”

iGEM calls these “commercial teams.” The cohort from Korea working on the Ozempic substitute was one. Their leader, Theo Jeon, explained the science behind the project. Jeon is a Korean-American high school junior from Bergen County, New Jersey who had spent the summer at a private academy in Seoul working on it. Ten of his 24 teammates were also Americans. A banner on the Seoul academy’s website lists some of the onward destinations of its students: Stanford, Princeton, Caltech, Cornell. 

A commercial team from China made it to the finals. The pupils from TestDaily, a Beijing college counseling and test preparation center, had developed a solution to root rot in soybeans, a pernicious disease that destroys 50,000 tons of the crop each year in China. 

The TestDaily students’ biographies listed top schools in cities such as Chongqing and Shenzhen. There was also a smattering of North American backgrounds. One hailed from Millburn High School in New Jersey; another, Skyline High School in Utah; and a third, Marianopolis College in Quebec.

In America, it would be the kind of wholesome geographic diversity a college admissions office would slap on a brochure, evidence of the U.S. higher education sector’s enduring magnetism to the world’s best and brightest. Here, in other words, were some of America’s smartest teens, except they had spent their summers on the other side of the Pacific doing biotech research in China. 

A WARNING

In February, Endy went to Capitol Hill to warn that the U.S. was falling behind in biotechnology. 

Citing China’s growing footprint at iGEM, he warned that biotech education in the U.S. was lagging. Moreover, he added, in key stages of development from research to manufacturing, the U.S. was at risk of being outgunned by China’s enormous investments in the sector. 

Between 2019 and 2023, China produced nearly 60 percent of the world’s most highly cited academic papers on synthetic biology. It also accounts for 70 percent of global capacity for fermentation, the process by which organic compounds such as amino acids, vitamins and antibiotics — the elementary building blocks for the ‘bio-economy’ — are made. 

A critical issue, Endy testified, is that the cost of doing R&D in the U.S. is increasingly uncompetitive vis-à-vis China, and the U.S. is failing to invest in new tools that would make the process cheaper.

“We fail to sustain public investments in the foundational science and tool development needed to generate an evergreen transformation in how we partner with biology to solve problems,” he told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Ginkgo’s Kelly agrees. “The problem we have is not that there is a shortage of applications [for synthetic biology], it’s that the tools suck for getting biology to do what we want it to do,” he says. “But 97 percent of venture capital funding [in synthetic biology] does not go to that problem. It goes to trying to develop applications with the tools that we have today.”

We fail to sustain public investments in the foundational science and tool development needed to generate an evergreen transformation in how we partner with biology to solve problems.

Drew Endy, iGem Co-Founder

Chinese companies, by contrast, are investing heavily in improving synthetic biologists’ toolkits, and are now competing in areas where U.S. companies were early innovators.

For example, San Diego-based Illumina was a pioneer in building machines for genome sequencing (reading DNA). Now, one of its biggest competitors is China’s MGI, a former subsidiary of BGI that was spun out and publicly listed in 2022. In March, as part of their retaliation against the Trump administration’s trade tariffs, Chinese authorities banned the import of Illumina’s machines. The ban was lifted in November. 

Chinese companies are also racing to take on U.S. leaders in genome synthesis (writing DNA). Firms like San Francisco-based Twist Bioscience, which developed a proprietary synthesis machine, face competition from Chinese firms such as GenScript, whose researchers construct complex genes manually. Chinese firms are working on machines that can automate the process, further bringing down costs. At iGEM, a company called LinkZill, based in Hangzhou, was demonstrating a DNA synthesizer roughly the size of a laserjet printer. The company says it has expanded into more than 20 countries. 

“I wish to make genome synthesis as cheap and as fast as genome sequencing,” Chantel Yue Shen, chief scientist for synthetic biology at BGI, said in a presentation at iGEM. 

One way for the U.S. to keep up would be to slow China down. The Biosecure Act, which was passed as part of Congress’ annual defense authorization bill and signed into law by President Trump last week, prohibits U.S. biotech companies that receive government funding from working with Chinese firms alleged by the Pentagon to be associated with the Chinese military. BGI and MGI are currently on that list, known as Section 1260H. Biosecure’s passing is a rare win for China hawks in Congress under the Trump administration. When it was first floated in late 2024, industry lobbyists made sure it died in the House.

Some policymakers have recommended additional steps. In April, a special congressional commission charged with reviewing how biotechnology could affect U.S. national security recommended that the federal government block the sale of advanced biotech products to China. Ginkgo’s Kelly, who chaired the commission, believes the U.S. should go even further and stop accepting phase one clinical trial results from China, potentially negating its cost and speed advantages in drug development.

But as China pulls ahead, disengaging with its companies could make it harder for the U.S. biotech community to shape the direction of the industry.

While the days of Washington dispatching researchers to China to promote biotech may be past, events such as iGEM still help set norms for the industry on everything from best lab practices to the difficult ethical questions around genetic engineering.

At the Grand Jamboree, teams are scored not just on the technical merits of their project, but on factors including consideration for social impact and sustainability. Some of the finalist teams spoke extensively about their efforts to consult lawyers and other scientists on the feasibility and ethics of their work.

“The fastest way to diffuse a new norm in synthetic biology is by including it in iGEM’s judging standards,” says Endy. “It’s one of the reasons iGEM in the United States has to become a lot stronger. It has to remain a global competition where people who want to be the world leaders [in synthetic biology] have to go.”

But as things are trending, the competition increasingly looks like China’s to lose. For it is not just China’s presence that is increasing at iGEM. The country is playing an ever greater role in the event’s operations.

Every iGEM team receives a package of standardized biological ‘parts’ to use on their projects. Previously, the kits were made in the U.S., often by a private company on a pro bono basis. In 2023 and 2024, the kits were made by Asimov, a Boston-based biotech firm. But the company decided not to produce the kit this year, citing high costs, according to Endy and Cumbers. 

The Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology — a research institution under the Chinese Academy of Sciences — stepped up and volunteered to provide the kits, marking the first time they were made in China. 

“It’s a massive soft power victory,” Endy said of the institute’s contribution. “The real question is, what’s stopping this whole thing from eventually moving to Shenzhen?”

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