Arzeda designs enzymes for products ranging from laundry detergent to stevia. But when it comes time to manufacture at commercial scale, the Seattle-based startup often has to look overseas.

That’s why, when a federal biotechnology commission visited Seattle on Tuesday, the industry came forward with a problem: They have the science, but lack the infrastructure and workforce pipeline to keep innovation on U.S. soil.

Arzeda’s designs reach an estimated 1.8 billion consumers worldwide, and the company has spent the better part of two decades building its technology. The company’s enzymes, sometimes designed in days rather than weeks thanks to AI, are largely manufactured in Western Europe and India — with one U.S. contract manufacturing partner in Wisconsin. 

Finding domestic manufacturers with the expertise and capacity to make these specialized proteins has been difficult, CEO Alexandre Zanghellini said. And for a company trying to commercialize new biotechnology, he added, manufacturing delays can be “catastrophic.” 

The federal group visiting Seattle — the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology — was created by Congress to address these kinds of problems. Since 2022, the team of 11 bipartisan experts have examined how biotech intersects with national security, and what the U.S. needs to do to remain competitive with China. 

Last year, the commission drafted a report to Congress with 49 recommendations spanning at least $15 billion in federal investment over five years, with policies to get more private capital into biotechnology, build domestic manufacturing capacity, strengthen the workforce and reduce vulnerabilities in the supply chain. 

Now, with the commission sunsetting in December, its members are taking their case around the country. 

The science is here, the infrastructure isn’t

In Seattle, the urgent matter is finding a way to keep biotechnology breakthroughs in the United States. Alexander Titus, a commission member who has headed AI-focused biotech initiatives in Seattle and nationwide, said Washington stands out for its early innovation and research. 

“Companies like Arzeda are having pretty serious leadership roles in the AI and bio space,” he told GeekWire. “A lot of the work we have done in the commission has revolved around helping the U.S. meet the moment when it comes to this nexus.” 

Institutions like the University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and the Allen Institute have helped build a deep life-sciences ecosystem in Washington. UW’s Institute for Protein Design, led by 2024 Nobel Prize winner David Baker, has spun out more than 20 companies.

One is Arzeda, which has an increasingly fast agentic workflow that can fine-tune a model, suggest the next experiment, and allow researchers to test thousands of sequences in a single round. The company’s first AI-designed commercial product was a stevia ingredient launched in 2024; it’s now negotiating a $44 million contract with the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency related to biothreat response. 

While technology is moving quickly, the infrastructure needed to commercialize it is not — creating what Seattle biotech leaders called a “valley of death” between research and manufacturing.

The U.S. has federal funding for basic research, as well as a venture-capital system that can finance early-stage discoveries. But once a company needs to build or access physical infrastructure for commercial-scale manufacturing, the financing becomes much harder. Venture capital investors don’t see the returns attractive enough, Zanghellini said. Banks aren’t eager to finance them, either. 

The pull of overseas manufacturing

Meanwhile, China has spent two decades making biotechnology a strategic priority, and its 2026 Five-Year Plan doubles down on areas including biomedicine, biomanufacturing, pharmaceuticals and brain-computer interfaces. For U.S. companies in the race, that can create an uncomfortable incentive: If the infrastructure is cheaper and faster somewhere else, that’s where the work often goes. 

Last year, Seattle-based Sana Biotechnology canceled plans for a manufacturing plant that was supposed to employ hundreds of workers in Bothell, Wash., instead opting for a contract manufacturer elsewhere to cut costs. Snehal Patel, the company’s executive vice president and chief technical officer, said on Tuesday he’s optimistic the Seattle area could compete on speed and cost with China’s fully integrated supply chain — with the right resources.

Ideally, manufacturing facilities in the U.S. would offer flexibility and knowledge in different products and processes, while ensuring trade secret protection.

The commissioners recognize this need; among their recommendations for Congress is a nationwide manufacturing network for precommercial, bioindustrial product scale-up. That could address the problem Seattle companies face: a startup shouldn’t have to choose between sending manufacturing overseas or trying to build an entire facility itself.

The commission has also recommended requiring companies to disclose points of supply-chain vulnerability in foreign countries of concern. If a geopolitical conflict disrupts the supply of medicines or other biological products, Titus said, the consequences can reach Americans far from any battlefield.

“Being able to keep and maintain our leadership in certain industries allows us to have the edge in any given situation,” he said. “We want our industries to be able to produce here…it’s truly national security in the broadest sense at this point.”

Building the workforce pipeline

To accomplish this, companies need a stronger industrial biomanufacturing workforce.

Rebecca Bryant, Fred Hutch’s director of government relations and a former staffer for Rep. Adam Smith, said while Washington trains well for research, there’s no equivalent pipeline into entry-level biomanufacturing jobs. Titus sees the issue as part of a broader problem of “bioliteracy” — that biology should be a basic problem-solving tool in the same way that engineering, chemistry and computing are, rather than a specialized field understood by few. 

In Washington, the Hutch Advance partnership with Shoreline Community College trains and places lab technicians, while Sana Biotechnology has worked on a model for moving workers into biomanufacturing. Seattle industry leaders suggested a state or federally-supported workforce consortium to bolster the effort. Meanwhile, the commission has urged Congress for more biomanufacturing training support. 

According to the commission, the next three years will determine whether the U.S. remains the global leader in biotechnology or cedes the future to China. Of the commission’s 49 recommendations, Titus said, 26 have been written into law in some capacity. The next step is in the hands of Congress, federal agencies, states and the industry itself. 

Less than a year after emerging from stealth operations with $12.7 million and partnerships with pharmaceutical giants, Seattle-based biotech startup Accipiter Biosciences has added $10.5 million to its funding total. The new cash will let the company move faster on promising drug candidates.

“We could have stuck with the original plan and been just fine,” said Matthew Bick, Accipiter Bio’s co-founder and CEO. “But we thought we’d rather capitalize on the progress we’ve made now and diversify our clinical portfolio.”

The team has grown to 22 people and includes researchers who worked at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design under Nobel laureate David Baker.

The company uses artificial intelligence tools developed at the institute to engineer proteins with the unusual ability to bind multiple cellular targets at once, potentially amplifying their ability to fight illnesses.

“We’re not just trying to replicate what antibodies can do,” Bick said. “We’re unlocking some really interesting biology.”

Accipiter Bio has a collaboration and license agreement with Pfizer to research and engineer new molecules. The deal provides an upfront payment and the potential to earn more than $330 million through milestones and royalties. The startup has a similarly structured agreement with oncology drug company Kite Pharma, owned by Gilead Sciences, to design proteins for use in cell therapies.

The startup also runs its own in-house drug-development programs. It originally planned to advance one or two into the clinic, but the extra cash will allow it to bring three or four programs forward into clinical trials. Bick said the company is now primarily focused on immunology-related conditions, alongside its lead oncology program.

The company launched in March 2023, emerging from stealth in November 2025. The new funding is an addition to Accipiter Bio’s seed round and includes only existing investors. Flying Fish Partners and Takeda co-led the seed round, which included Columbus Venture Partners, Cercano Capital, WRF Capital, Alexandria Investments, Pack Ventures and Argonautic Ventures.

The new funding will help grow the team, bringing in additional scientists and reaching a headcount of about 30 people over the next six months to a year.

Interest continues to grow in AI’s potential to speed up the creation of new drugs. But Bick cautions that the process isn’t as simple as some might suggest, particularly for more complex therapeutics.

He knows this firsthand: he and two of his co-founders worked at Neoleukin, a biotech company co-founded by Baker that spun out of the UW in 2019. The startup’s lead drug candidate, an engineered protein used in cancer treatment, underperformed in a Phase 1 trial. Neoleukin laid off many of its employees before merging with another company.

“There’s an impression with AI methods that you can just hit a button and you get your molecule out, but it’s not that easy — and certainly when you’re pushing the methods to their limits, it’s really not that easy,” Bick said.

The process still requires asking the right therapeutic questions, manual engineering and a deep understanding of the molecules, he said. “There’s still protein intuition that comes into it.”