BEIJING -- China launched its anti-doping agency including a world-level laboratory serving the Olympic Games in Beijing on Monday.

The China Anti-Doping Agency, standing beside the old building of China Anti-Doping Center, will face its first major task in August next year when about 4,500 doping tests will be carried out here during the Beijing Olympics.

"With the approval of the State Council, the China Anti-Doping Agency has been officially established," said Duan Shijie, vice director of State General Administration of Sports, at the inaugural ceremony.

"Our efforts combating doping in the past 20 years received good results. The positive rate in doping tests for Chinese athletes is much lower than the world average. But doping control remains a hard, complicated and long term job for us. With the agency setting up, it is safe to say that our government made one breakthrough in the fight against doping," Duan said.

The Agency will have 60 staff including 20 experts carrying out doping tests daily but the number will be increased to 150 during the Olympics with 20 foreign experts expected to be invited to join the work force.

Agency director Du Lijun said that they were in full swing to prepare the new lab for an inspection by the International Olympic Committee later this year.

"We are very busy with preparing the lab, which sees new, state-of-art equipments bought and some old ones moved here from the previous China Anti-Doping Center lab close by," said Du. Half a dozen new equipments have been installed in one of the lab rooms on second floor.

"Besides that, we have much work to do. We need to step up our research for new testing ways to keep up with WADA's requirements, " he said. "Because we not only conduct tests for Chinese athletes, we are also entrusted to do tests for athletes from other Asian countries and regions."

"And one of our important tasks besides the Olympics is to set up a prevention system in the society with the cooperation from other government departments in order to discourage the drug abuse," said Du.

"Anti-doping fight has go far beyond the sport field so we will coordinate between different departments in our fight against doping," he added.