As Shanghai nurses its ambition to build itself into global science and innovation center, medical institutions in the city have also stepped up their pace of commercializing their research findings and transforming more patents into practical use.
Ruijin Hospital, affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, announced it will transform more of its scientific patents with high market value into practical applications by working with the city's Zhangjiang intellectual property operation platform.
The platform was established as part of the city's efforts to promote scientific innovation and boost the development of intellectual property. It aims to help intellectual property projects and technology companies solve problems in industrialization and financing.
Guided by the government, the platform is fully invested in by private capital and operated under market principles. It provides services for commercializing scientific findings, such as scientific and technological invention information disclosures, business value assessments, patent designs and application marketing.
The first step for the cooperation between Ruijin Hospital and Zhangjiang intellectual property operation platform is to transform an early diagnostic reagent of gastric cancer into practical use, which will benefit an extensive number of gastric patients.
Doctors said nearly half of new gastric cancer cases each year worldwide are from China, and the first step to solve the problem is to achieve early diagnosis, but in both the domestic and international medical market there is a lack of a clinical early diagnostic marker for gastric cancer.
The early diagnostic reagent developed by the research team at Ruijin Hospital can help detect the symptoms of gastric cancer through blood tests without using gastroscopy, which often makes patients uncomfortable. The scientific research has taken nearly 10 years and received the city's highest science and technology award in 2012.
According to the cooperation agreement, the project will be invested in by Shanghai Jingyuan investment company, which will provide a series of innovative services to promote patient transformation, such as incubating, cultivation and industrialization. It will also shorten the time period of intellectual property industrialization and work as a good example of the commercialization of scientific findings.
"Large sample clinical trials for this early diagnostic reagent have showed good market prospects. If it can be quickly commercialized, the treatment of gastric cancer in our country will be significantly improved," said Qu Jieming, president of Ruijin Hospital.
According to industry experts, compared to developed countries, the efficiency of transforming patents into practical applications in China is still low, largely due to the limitation of institutional mechanisms and weak awareness of scientific research personnel. This leads to many scientific findings in universities and institutes being "shelved and forgotten".
As Shanghai is building itself into global science and technology center, working out ways to allow these valuable findings to serve the public has drawn wide attention.
Qu said the hospital has lots of research findings with good market prospects. To carry out intellectual property transformation work with investment and positive support will help these medical findings quickly enter the market and serve people, he said.
wanghongyi@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 08/19/2015 page17)
