Xinhua Silk Road: E. China's Wuxi city steps up biomedical industry development

The 2022 Taihu Bay Future Healthcare Conference held Thursday in Wuxi City in east China's Jiangsu Province witnessed the launch of Wuxi Intellectual Property Protection Center with 52 biomedical projects contracted, involving a total of more than 30 billion yuan investment.

Biomedical industry is an important part of Wuxi's modern industrial system construction during the 14th Five-Year Plan(2021-2025) period. Its scale topped 140 billion yuan in 2021, a year-on-year increase of 24 percent, making Wuxi among the top 20 prefecture-level cities listed in China Biomedical Industry Barometer in 2021.

Besides the property protection center, six biomedical industrial parks were licensed and three biomedical public platforms were inaugurated at the conference, which are expected to inject impetus to the development of Wuxi's biomedical industry.

The city will strengthen and expand its industrial chain to build a 200-billion-yuan modern biomedical industrial cluster, said Du Xiaogang, Secretary of the Wuxi Municipal Party Committee of CPC.

The biomedical industry started early in Wuxi. With good foundation, it has developed a relatively comp industry chain covering chemical raw medicine production, preparation production, and pharmaceutical service outsourcing, and gathered 1,278 biomedical companies such as AstraZeneca and WuXi Biologics AppTech, showing strong clustering effect.

Aiming at building a world-class biomedical industry highland with distinctive characteristics, Wuxi not only issued a special policy tailored for the development of biomedical industrial parks, but also established a special fund for modern biomedical industry to reward breakthrough in the forward-looking technologies and innovation research. In 2021, Wuxi funded more than 32 million yuan for the science and technology development of 43 biomedical projects.

Multiple fund agreements were signed at the conference, including a biomedical fund of 5 billion yuan jointly established by Guolian Group, AstraZeneca, and China International Capital Corporation Limited.