Riding the tide IX: Nanjing's Jiangbei New Area helps promote transfer of research achievements

The Ministry of Education and Jiangsu Province have jointly established the first national regional technology transfer and transformation center for universities, with Nanjing undertaking the construction tasks of the Biomedical Center and Information and Communication Center to focus on exploring successful paradigms for the transformation of scientific and technological achievements. The first national university biopharmaceutical regional technology transfer and transformation sub-center, located in Jiangbei New Area of Nanjing, has played an important role.

The National Biomedical Regional Technology Transfer and Transformation Sub-Center has gathered innovative projects from 66 universities across the country. The Nanjing Biomedical Valley, which is separated by a street, has gathered over 1300 biopharmaceutical companies.

On April 28th, the Nanjing Biomedical Branch Center held its first academic salon, attracting more than 70 representatives from universities and enterprises. Aaron Ciechanover, a Nobel laureate, shared his research and development experience.

Fu Ziyi, Associate Researcher at the Cancer Hospital Affiliated to Nanjing Medical University, shared that they may feel a bit confused about protein degradation research now, but Aaron Ciechanover said that this era is coming soon. With Nobel laureate guiding them in this direction, they have strengthened their confidence in this field.

This sub center can find targeted support at every stage, from concept validation and pilot testing to technology maturation and achievement transformation.

A small molecule targeted drug targeting cell apoptosis developed by Professor Zhao Quan's team from the School of Life Sciences at Nanjing University has been approved by the US FDA and the China National Medical Products Administration. With the first phase of clinical trials about to be started, raising trial funds has become an urgent task.

At a critical moment, the Nanjing Biomedical Center offered a helping hand by giving Professor Zhao Quan's team a credit support of 5 million yuan in just 2 weeks.

The funding is jointly customized by the branch center and the bank. Professor Zhao Quan's team only needs to provide a technical product evaluation report issued by the branch center to obtain a lower interest rate loan.

According to Zhao Quan, Professor at the National Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, School of Life Sciences, Nanjing University, the interest rate is very favorable, the application process is simple and the bank has eliminated some technical evaluation processes. The achievement conversion loan does not require collateral which gives them confidence in the future and will obtain equity financing after a period of time.

The promotion of achievement transformation by research teams in universities cannot be achieved without the support of technical managers. Wu Hao, who graduated with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Peking University, is one of them. In April, he and his colleagues visited 30 universities to collect conversion projects.

Wu Hao said that in the next step, they will sort out the scientific research projects collected from these universities. For some projects with high maturity and clear conversion intentions, the Nanjing Biomedical Branch will connect with suitable enterprises for university teams to facilitate transfer and conversion. For those who are willing to incubate, the sub center will undertake the full process incubation function, helping university teams find industry demand and market direction, and better facilitate project implementation.

Taking the construction of the Nanjing Biomedical Sub-center as an opportunity, Nanjing will further improve its scientific and technological achievements transformation system this year by striving to increase the annual technology contract turnover by more than 10% to reach 110 billion yuan while making every effort to build Nanjing into the preferred place for the transfer and transformation of scientific and technological achievements.

[Notes]

The establishment of the country's first regional university technology transfer center here represents not only trust and challenge, but also opportunity. With this boost, an increasing number of cutting-edge technologies will be transformed into reality here, further broadening the ancient capital's path of innovation.