Tianjin honors contributors to anti-virus fight

Tianjin honored nine leading companies, research institutions and universities with awards recognizing their outstanding contributions in the fight against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on Thursday.

The award is the first of its kind in the country to honor such commitment at the provincial-level.

Dai Yongkang, director of the Tianjin Municipal Science and Technology Bureau, said at the awards ceremony that Tianjin's solid science and technological foundation had paved the way to address urgent market demands since the outbreak.

"Its efforts, including progress toward a COVID-19 vaccine, traditional Chinese medicine injections, a test kit for the virus and other contributions, have played a key role," he said.

A prominent award-winner is the team led by Zhang Boli, president of Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which performed a minor miracle by mitigating the COVID-19 illness using traditional Chinese medicines in makeshift hospitals in Wuhan, Hubei province. The effort focused world attention on TCM.

Zhang said during the awards ceremony "During the campaign, the team has investigated more than 1,000 cases with different symptoms and analyzed treatment effects more than 2,000 cases, which helped inform the choice between conventional modern medicine or the widely adopted and effective traditional medicines."

Zhang Junhua, director of the science and research department of TCM university and a head of the team, said the world's medical sector "has paid close attention to TCM".

For its part, the city gave Bioscience (Tianjin) Diagnostic Technology Co a special award for its efforts to advance a COVID-19 antibody testing method, a pioneering effort to augment the antibody test to improve accuracy and precision in confirming COVID-19 in humans.

The company's diagnostic kits for the coronavirus antibody were the first of the Chinese products to earn CE (Conformite Europeenne) technical qualification in Europe.

Luan Dawei, president of the company, noted that its products have been provided to more than 600 Chinese hospitals and overseas hospitals in Italy, Malaysia and Myanmar and Thailand."

Several award-winners shared insights from their bumpy roads to enable their products to stand at the peak of scientific and technological commitment during the country's campaign against COVID-19.

Yao Xiaoqing, president of Tianjin Chase Sun Pharmaceutical Co, the producer of the Xuebijing injection, one of the three traditional Chinese medicines pinpointed by government authorities to treat the coronavirus pneumonias, said it "has undergone 10 years of difficult component-based studies in line with rigorous Western medicine research standards, and convinced Western counterparts by its effects and results".

Song Xiao, president of Teda Filter Co, the country's top face mask filter producer, noted that it was "the top technology in meltblown cloth that could cement our production volume quickly and boost production capacity of 6 tons per day to 10 tons per day — enough raw material for 100,000 face masks".