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The US-India biotech collaboration under TRUST is more than a bilateral game; it can help reshape global value chains and promote inclusive, ethical innovation
In July 2025, Nobel Laureate David Gross highlighted a fundamental requirement for India’s aspiration to be self-reliant and for making the ‘Make in India’ initiative successful, which the country currently lacks: discovery and innovation. For India to enhance its technological capabilities and global influence, there is a critical need to integrate government, academia, and industry. Although this has been intuitively understood, it has rarely been explicitly addressed. In February 2025, the United States (US) and India launched the US-India TRUST Initiative (Transforming the Relationship Utilising Strategic Technology) during Prime Minister Modi’s Official Working Visit to Washington, DC. Other diplomatic changes, like the new tariffs imposed upon India, changes in immigration rules and visa requirements, will alter global relations. This diplomatic effort has the potential to redefine global innovation ecosystems, focusing on various areas of technology, including biotechnology, allowing India to expand its capabilities in discovering and inventing.
Biotechnology is not merely about research and development (R&D) in healthcare, but bridges key sectors like food security, climate resilience, biomanufacturing, and even defence. The US has intensified its focus on biotechnology in various domains, most notably with the establishment of the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) in 2022, which continues to focus on emerging biotechnology in the defence and security sector. The US also hosts a depth of advanced R&D, translational research, and deep-tech capital.
The US has intensified its focus on biotechnology in various domains, most notably with the establishment of the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) in 2022, which continues to focus on emerging biotechnology in the defence and security sector.
As of 2023, India was ranked 3rd by volume of contribution and 14th by value of global contribution of generic drugs, making it a global leader. For India, the TRUST Initiative presents an opportunity to expand its capacity beyond being a global pharmacy and invest in research and development, thereby becoming a leader in biotech innovation. India is an ever-growing pool of talent and a consistently cost-efficient market. Together, these strengths could substantially reduce the time and cost of drug development, bringing life-saving innovations to underserved communities throughout the Global South.
India's BioE3 policy (Biotech for Economic Empowerment and Equity), released in August 2024, represents a strategic shift towards employing biotechnology for innovation and inclusive economic development. The policy focuses on three core areas: enhancing entrepreneurship; ensuring access to healthcare innovation; bridging the research, policy, and industry gaps through fostering start-ups, streamlining complex bureaucratic procedures, and encouraging partnerships.
Here, the TRUST Initiative can serve as a structural facilitator for investments in three areas:
Collectively, this unique overlap has the potential to drive the next wave of global biotech innovation, with India not only as a player but also as a collaborative leader in shaping global health, biotechnology innovation, and biomanufacturing outcomes.
The intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnology is rapidly reshaping the boundaries of medicine, the life sciences, and healthcare delivery. By creating scalable, interoperable, and secure digital-biotech architectures, TRUST enables India to become a key node in the global effort to bridge biotechnology and artificial intelligence. India and the US can collaborate to co-create a known AI-biotech innovation ecosystem. This ecosystem should feature a federated learning architecture for cross-border biomedical research, ensuring no compromise on data privacy and security. It should also include interoperable bioinformatics platforms that combine genomics, clinical information, and drug development pipelines. Additionally, it may involve (ethical) AI-based biomanufacturing, enabling the precision production of vaccines, biologics, and cell therapies.
By creating scalable, interoperable, and secure digital-biotech architectures, TRUST enables India to become a key node in the global effort to bridge biotechnology and artificial intelligence.
Such a digital-biotech convergence ecosystem would not just hasten the pace of innovation. With biotechnology remaining increasingly data-intensive, bioethics questions, issues of data sovereignty, dual-use threat, and algorithmic bias are now central. The TRUST Initiative can act as a catalyst to enable a collective leadership framework in tackling these issues, ensuring that AI-biotech innovations remain human-centred and universally accessible, also offering a counter to fragmented and techno-nationalist visions, providing a scalable template for the Global South, showcasing how emerging economies can co-develop frontier technologies without sacrificing autonomy or values.
Between the US and India, there is a requirement to merge ambition and regulatory initiative. Without diplomatic efforts to bandage diplomatic differences, distrust can affect global economic and developmental efforts. The vision needs to be converted into binding norms, institutional frameworks, and international partnerships that facilitate innovation and accountability. Currently, India faces significant challenges that hinder its potential growth in biotechnology and innovation.
Converging standards within jurisdictions, especially for procedures like approvals for clinical trials, biosafety standards, and intellectual property (IP) regimes, is crucial to enable cross-border collaboration and minimise time-to-market for essential health technologies. This involves implementing ethical review procedures, recognising trial data across borders, and updating IP legislation to enable open science models, public–private R&D, and AI-driven discoveries more effectively. Without this scaffolding of regulation, scientific collaboration can stay patchy and exposed to legal ambiguity.
As international biotech value chains develop, trade policy will be at the centre of reconciling openness with resilience. Tax credits, privileged access to markets, and R&D subsidies should be crafted not only to lure foreign investment but to enhance national capacity and technological independence. An effort should be made to ensure funding without asymmetrical dependencies. This may include excessive dependence on foreign-sourced biologic ingredients or digital infrastructure, which can be countered by incorporating mutual benefit clauses and technology transfer obligations into trade pacts.
In high-stakes areas such as synthetic biology, genomics, and gene editing, transparency, trust, and consent are an absolute necessity. Interoperability, security, and federation of data systems must be complemented by a collective ethical foundation that keeps pace with the diversity of global legal systems, cultural norms, and public health priorities. This would involve resolving dual-use issues, ensuring fair access to data, and providing equitable attribution of scientific credit, particularly for innovations derived from indigenous knowledge or public datasets.
Interoperability, security, and federation of data systems must be complemented by a collective ethical foundation that keeps pace with the diversity of global legal systems, cultural norms, and public health priorities.
Together, these policy pillars constitute the institutional foundation of the TRUST Initiative. Absent from them are networks of biotechnology and artificial intelligence that might speed scientific progress. However, if incorporated well, with them, India and its international partners can set new benchmarks for bioinnovation, ensuring it is regulated, remains open, ethical, and robust to both opportunities and risks.
The US-India biotech collaboration under TRUST is more than a bilateral game; it's a geostrategic step that has the potential to transform global biotech value chains, democratise access to innovation, and lay the groundwork for resilient, inclusive, and ethical bio-industrial development. If India seizes this momentum, supported by its BioE3 policy, regulatory upgrades and AI usage, India can emerge both as a player in the biotech revolution and as a co-designer of its global future.
Shravishtha Ajaykumar is an Associate Fellow with the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
Shravishtha Ajaykumar is Associate Fellow at the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology. Her fields of research include geospatial technology, data privacy, cybersecurity, and strategic ...
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