International cooperation on advanced medical technologies reached at CIIE

International cooperation on advanced medical technologies such as high-end genetic testing, digital pathology platforms, and an innovative tool testing the risk of lung disease by breath are being achieved at the ongoing China International Import Expo.

The expo features a special section for domestic companies to have better access to world-leading technologies and achieve collaboration with industry giants to boost medical innovation.

Seven domestic scientific technology companies signed cooperation agreements with Roche Diagnostics to jointly establish a precise medicine network through next-generation sequencing technology to enhance the introduction and promotion of high-end technology in domestic hospitals as well as pushing a whole-process automatic and intelligent laboratory medicine.

Next-generation sequencing is one of the most important frontier technologies, which has a wide application in early cancer screening, relapse monitoring, rare disease testing, and infectious disease diagnosis.

However, the technology has a more complicated process, more steps, and a higher demand on analysis.

Targeting the problems, the network plans to achieve a whole-process automatic NGS testing plan by combining the products and technologies of all members to work out a complete service from sample collection and processing and high-throughput sequencing to result analysis to provide domestic hospital a "sample in, result out" solution.

In order to boost a smart medicine-based diagnosis, Roche Diagnostics also teamed up with its domestic counterparts to form a China Pathology Eco-System for a joint digital solution on pathology, the golden evidence for medical decision and treatment outcome forecast.

Ti Gong

Officials said the eco-system is a product of the over-flow effects of an AI pathology platform launched during last year's CIIE to further expand and streamline the digital transformation through AI-assisted pathology evaluation.

This would support doctors' judgement and improve their efficiency and accuracy, provide a long-distance diagnosis platform and expert database to realize sharing of medical resources, meet patients' demands, and improve the capability of hospitals in different regions and levels.

Cooperation for innovative medical technology development was also announced by Boehringer Ingelheim which will team up with Guangzhou-based ChromX Health, a domestic high-tech company, to jointly develop innovative tools for early screening and diagnosis on interstitial lung disease and whole-process patient management.

Interstitial lung disease (ILD) with complicated and unclear causes can cause scarring of the lungs, which in turn leads to stiffness in the lungs, making it difficult to breathe and get oxygen into the bloodstream, and eventually causing lung damage.

For one type of ILD called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the five-year survival rate is less than 30 percent and the average survival for patients in acute cases is only 2.2 months, much shorter than many other cancers.

However, ILD has no significant symptoms in the early stage so patients usually miss the best treatment opportunity before the disease is confirmed. Effective tools for early screening and diagnosis are extremely important.

The cooperation is expected to develop technology to identify people with risk of ILD through testing their breath and push a regular and effective follow-up disease management through innovative solutions, officials said.