Health collaborations forged at CIIE begin to bear fruit

Boston Scientific also said that together with Vivolight, it will jointly study firsthand clinical feedback and accelerate the upgrade of products. It further said the technology will soon be applied in more than 2,000 hospitals in China and benefit more patients.

Danish biopharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk said it collaborated with Microsoft during the third CIIE to develop a smart robot that can answer patients' queries about diabetes and help popularize knowledge in the disease area.

The medical consultant robot will be launched for public use later this month.

Novo Nordisk said the robot shows how collaborations could create synergies between two unrelated corporates, one an industry leader in the diabetes area and the other a pioneer in artificial intelligence and cloud technology.

"Through this collaboration, we aimed to build a smart Q&A platform in Chinese so that more of the country's public can have access to authoritative, in-depth knowledge about the chronic disease. This will ultimately help patients better manage disease development and improve their living quality," said Christine Zhou, senior vice-president and president of China branch at Novo Nordisk.

Pharmaceutical multinationals that took part in the third CIIE said innovative therapies unveiled at the event have begun to benefit Chinese patients already.

For instance, Vyndamax, a drug developed by US-based Pfizer, is the world's first to treat a kind of rare, potentially fatal heart disease. It was officially marketed in China during the third CIIE and was first prescribed at a Beijing hospital on Dec 7.

Since then, the oral drug has been prescribed at 10 medical institutions across the country and numerous patients are said to have benefited from it. Previously, such patients tend to survive only an average of 2 to 3.5 years after diagnosis.