June 15, 2026
Dear Members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions:
The Pharmaceutical Industry Labor-Management Association (PILMA), a coalition uniting the biopharmaceutical industry and America’s building trades unions around a shared commitment to medical innovation and high-quality union jobs, strongly opposes the Medication Affordability and Patent Integrity Act (S. 2658). As the Committee prepares to mark up the bill this week, we urge members to carefully consider how this legislation could compromise U.S. life sciences intellectual property and America’s position as a world leader in biotechnology, while benefiting China at the expense of American workers.
In particular, the bill requires life science companies to share with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office confidential information submitted to the FDA — including trade secrets, proprietary manufacturing processes, and clinical data developed at enormous cost and risk. This creates an immediate and serious vulnerability: unlike the FDA, which maintains robust protections for confidential commercial information and trade secrets, the USPTO generally makes information it determines to be relevant to a patent application public shortly after submission. It is simply not structured to serve as a safe harbor for sensitive information — and once that information is exposed, it would be freely available to foreign competitors like China. This legislation is proposed at a time when China is taking active measures to infiltrate and compromise several American industries. PILMA strongly advocates that Congress enact stronger safeguards to protect all sensitive information and prevent its open sharing with our adversaries.
If sensitive trade secrets are exposed in this manner, China’s biotech sector would gain direct insight into the most guarded secrets of American life science companies. In turn, the risk to American innovation would be immediate and serious.
The United States faces no greater long-term competitive threat in the life sciences than China. Beijing is pouring unprecedented resources into displacing American leadership
in the sector that defines the future of global health and economic power. At this pivotal moment, the last thing American policymakers should do is hand China direct access to the innovations their own government is racing to replicate.
The strength of America’s biopharmaceutical industry is the engine that drives demand for the highly skilled union construction workers who build, renovate, and maintain the world-class research and manufacturing facilities that define this sector. According to PILMA’s most recent union job study, private-sector pharmaceutical and biotech construction investment generated more than 136 million labor hours across 18 states, the equivalent of nearly 14,500 full-time union construction jobs. Moreover, since the beginning of January 2025, life science companies have committed nearly $600 billion to building new facilities in the United States. Much of that work will be done by union workers.
These investments should not be taken for granted. They flow from a predictable, stable innovation ecosystem in which companies can confidently commit billions of dollars to long-term research and facility development, knowing their intellectual property will be protected. When that confidence is eroded — and when proprietary data can be exposed and exploited by foreign competitors — investment decisions change. As a result, projects already in planning could be reconsidered, and the consequences would ripple directly into the communities and jobsites where our members work.
For these reasons, PILMA strongly urges the Committee to reject S. 2658. Rather than weakening the intellectual property protections that sustain American innovation and the union jobs that depend on it, policymakers should pursue balanced, evidence-based reforms that address affordability without ceding our strategic and economic advantage to China.
We thank the Committee for its consideration and welcome the opportunity to discuss these concerns further.
Sincerely,
AJ Stokes
Executive Director
Pharmaceutical Industry Labor-Management Association