Month: October 2017

China will accelerate the development of the internet working with advanced manufacturing to boost innovation and entrepreneurship and the integration of enterprises of various sizes to advance the upgrading of the economy. The decision was made at a State Council executive meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang on Oct. 30. Companies will also be encouraged to build up cybersecurity, and the government will step up the development of infrastructure to make internet services faster and cheaper for SMEs. China has built its own satellite-based cloud system to which some 700 million computers and mobile phones are already linked. CAS news release, October 31, 2017

Financed by the Nanjing Yangtze Group with an investment of over 6 billion Yuan, the center offers a genome sequencing capacity of up to 500,000 people per year. A data storage center already completed will be able to store health and medical records of 80 million people. China Bio news release, October 30, 2017

As of September 2017, there were 525 CROs in China, of which 248 were clinical service enterprises and 262 non-clinical service enterprises. Location is mainly in Beijing, Shanghai and Jiangsu. 2004-14 was the peak period of CRO development, mainly benefiting from new “drug clinical trial quality management practices involving GCP, GLP and other industry policies. A common feature is that CROs are usually located in industrial parks, and their talent and education resources are abundant.” China Bio news release, October 30, 2017

The species cover chicken, dog, goat, human, poplar, rice and tomato and incorporate 8,669 individual genotypes and 13,262 manually curated high-quality genotype-to-phenotype associations for non-human species. GVM serves as an important resource for archiving genomic variation data, and is helpful for better understanding population genetic diversity and deciphering complex mechanisms associated with different phenotypes. CAS news release, October 27, 2017

QCEL aims at acquiring and evaluating local carbon emission data, studying and establishing methods, tools and modeling, and proposing practical proposals for a low-carbon strategy of Qingdao. This municipal carbon data/assessment engineering lab will address bottlenecks such as inaccuracy and decentralization of fundamental data and inapplicability of international mature approaches. QFEL cooperates with the Energy Foundation China (EFC), C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), Institute for Sustainable Community (ISC) and others, and is seeking international partnerships. China Bio news release, October 27, 2017

The group of CHEN Liquan at Qingdao Industrial Energy Storage Research Institute (QIESRI), a division of CAS QIBEBT, has discovered that highly concentrated aqueous electrolytes can optimize the Zn stripping/deposition processes and have proposed a smart cooling-recovery function by using a thermoreversible hydrogel as the functional electrolyte, which can repair the interfacial failure during cycling. These new types of Zn batteries exhibit high safety, energy density up to 40 Wh/kg, cycling life up to 500 times and cost less than 0.7 ￥/Wh. In addition, novel boron-centered, anion-based Mg-ion electrolytes characterized by high ionic conductivity, non-nucleophilicity, and a wide electrochemical window, provided potential benefits and new research directions for future low-cost secondary Mg batteries.  CAS news release, October 27, 2017

XU Guowang of CAS Dalian Instiute of Chemical Physics’ Institute of Biotechnology has found a new biomarker pattern consisting of phenylalanyl-tryptophan and glycocholate with a higher diagnostic performance than α-fetoprotein (AFP), which is the traditional biomarker for HCC. 80.6% of the AFP false-negative patients with HCC were correctly diagnosed using this panel in a test set of 1448 individuals in 6 hospitals. CAS news release, October 27, 2017

The Lake Nankang Qiyibai Biotechnology Co., Ltd. in Hunan, Wuhan Province (short Kang Biotech Co.) and Dupont’s Genencor Co. have entered into talks on a strategic cooperation for the development of the Chinese probiotic market. Kang Biotech is a leading supplier of cosmetic and dietary products and provides appropriate production facilities for the sensitive manufacturing and storage requirements of probiotics. Probiotics sales in China are booming at 20 % growth per year, and Genencor, with a growth of its China probiotics business of 50 % over the last 3 years, has announced to expand the capacity of its facility in Beijing. China Bio news release, October 26, 2017

The Zhangjiang Biobank has a storage capacity for 10 million samples of tissue, cells, organs, blood samples and other. It will also store 500,000 tumor tissue samples presently held in Shanghai’s National Engineering Research Center. The Zhangjiang Biobank will also establish a Helicobacter pylori and drug-resistant strains” library, as a resource for research and translational medicine.” China Bio news release, October 26, 2017

Starting and landing at Pucheng International Airport, the AT200 UAV aircraft completed its 26 min maiden flight on Oct. 26. The aircraft is equipped with Canadian Pratt & Whitney’s 750-horsepower PT6A turboprop engines and an advanced flight control and command system. It is 11.84 meters long, has a wingspan of 12.80 meters, and is 4.04 meters high. Maximum takeoff weight is 3.4 tons. Loading capacity is 10 cubic meters, for a load up to 1.5 tons , cruise speed is 313 km/h. It can fly up to 8 hours, within a range of 2183 km, and up to 6098 meters altitude. It is designed for freight feeder transport and can take off and land fully loaded on 200 meters simple runways even unpaved and with slopes. CAS news release, October 27, 2017