Beijing to build pharmaceutical innovation park, eyeing global scientists

BEIJING -- Beijing has unveiled a plan to construct an international pharmaceutical innovation park in a southern suburb and attract global scientists in medicine and health.

The park will be located in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, also dubbed Beijing E-Town, it was announced at the Third Conference of Global Health Forum of Boao Forum for Asia, which concluded Thursday.

With a planned area of 5.8 square km, the park will feature a cluster of international corporate headquarters, and focus on the fostering of world-class specialized hospitals and medicine-related industries.

The park will target frontier fields of health such as quantitative synthetic biology, new-generation high-throughput sequencing technology, and therapeutic gene editing technology, said Kong Lei, director of the management committee of the Beijing E-Town.

"It will attract strategic scientists, world-class leaders and innovation teams in science and technology from around the world," Kong said.

Beijing E-Town recently released the first group of artificial intelligence (AI) application scenarios, involving 10 fields such as medicines, health and pharmaceutical R&D.

"We will promote the integration of biotechnology and information technology, and boost new medicine R&D through AI computing power," Kong added.