over 70 guests, including leading scientists, academics and entrepreneurs from the biotech industry from around the world, attended the 2015 shenzhen international biotech summit at the shenzhen convention and exhibition center yesterday.
two keynote speeches, two formal discussions and eight professional forums were held during the summit, which covered various topics including cancer treatment, regulatory policies for biomedicine, 3-d printing of medical materials and the modernization of traditional chinese medicine.
(cuban officials at an exhibition booth during the shenzhen international biotech and health industry expo yesterday.)
one of the lecturers, carl h. june, a member of the american academy of sciences, has been working on cancer treatment with his team at the abramson cancer center at the university of pennsylvania for several years.
june explained the car-t cell therapy developed by his team, which takes a cancer patient’s white blood cells and genetically alters them so they can recognize and kill cancer cells.
“car-t cells can be serial killer cells, as each car-t cell can kill over 1,000 tumor cells,” june said, adding that making car-t cells requires five days, and the first patients treated in 2010 still have car-t cells in their blood.
june brought up a patient named emily whitehead. whitehead is known for being the first child to have beat leukemia with the help of car-t cell therapy in 2013, when she was 7 years old. “now we have more than 100 children like emily,” june added.
there are 77 trials of car-t cell therapy ongoing globally, with 20 of them in china, making china the second leading country in this field following the u.s. with 48 trials underway. june said the challenge is lowering the cost of treatment.
a delegation of the u.s. biotechnology industry organization (bio) also attended the opening ceremony of the summit. bio is the world’s largest trade association of biotech companies, institutes and research centers across the u.s. and in over 30 other nations and is expanding its influence in china.
(attendees of the 2015 shenzhen international biotech summit held in the shenzhen convention and exhibition center yesterday.)
“we believe we can be particularly helpful on issues including biology regulation, financing biotech startups and intellectual property,” said james greenwood, the president of bio. “there are lessons from other markets that we can take to help china expand and maximize its potential.”
along with the summit, shenzhen international biotech and health industry expo also opened in hall 2 of the convention and exhibition center yesterday. the three-day expo was attended by over 200 bioscience enterprises from china and around the world.
sixteen events will be hosted to brief visitors on the latest developments in the biotech industry and match biotech startups with investors. an ipo road show was held yesterday afternoon to help biomedicine companies that want to go public.
(source:shenzhen)
