Years of pouring money into its laboratories, wooing scientists home from overseas and urging researchers to publish and patent is starting to give China a competitive edge in biotechnology, a strategic field it sees as ripe for “indigenous innovation.”
The vast resources China can throw at research and development – overall funding more than quadrupled to $191 billion in 2005-13 and the Thousand Talents Program has repatriated scientists – allow China to jump quickly on promising new technologies, often first developed elsewhere.
These efforts were illustrated vividly in April – not without controversy – when scientists at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou published results of a ground-breaking experiment to alter the DNA of human embryos using new CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology.
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More than 50 Chinese institutions are patenting in the field, led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, universities, the Anhui Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Beijing Jifulin Biotech. Nearly a fifth of the 518 families of gene editing patents analyzed since 2004 were associated with Chinese entities.
For top-tier institutions, “the level of available resources is incredible in terms of the freedom, the flexibility that gives key leading Chinese scientists to move very, very fast on a given research track if a new opportunity arises,” said James Wilsdon, professor of science and democracy at the University of Sussex.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: China’s big biotech bet starting to pay off
