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As part of the North Rhine-Westphalian (NRW) – China cooperation initiative Dr. Christoph Block from BIO.NRW Cluster Biotechnology North Rhine-Westphalia and Jessica Wong from China Medical City (CMC) organized a forum for Chinese and NRW companies, which took place on November 14th at the MLM facilities in Mönchengladbach. The meeting was a follow-up to the delegation trip to CMC in Taizhou which took place in October earlier this year. Besides Jessica Wong, the delegation consisted of three further delegates: Dr. Liu Xinhu, Pan Zuozheng and Dr. Sen Ding from CMC.

In a very intense two-hour workshop the delegates and MLM representatives discussed possibilities for building up German-Chinese economic relationships in the field of clinical studies.

Main topics were the capabilities of CMC to support MLM in finding suitable CROs to identify joint, international clients and chances for Chinese students to conduct their bachelor- or master thesis at MLM.

After a very motivated two hour exchange, the CMC – BIO.NRW forum started in the afternoon with 30 participants, most of them being Chinese visitors or exhibitors at the MEDICA which takes place in Düsseldorf at the moment and NRW representatives from small, midsize and big Biotech companies.

For the first part Jessica Wong took over the moderation and started off with a small presentation of China Medical City followed by presentations from four companies who receive Chinese funding.

The first company, Zecen Biotech, is an in-vitro enterprise who is mainly specialized in providing total solutions of chemiluminescence immunoassays by developing, manufacturing and marketing the CLIA instruments and reagents. The company is active since 2011, privately held and has 300 employees, which distribute 1000 analyzer and 200 Million reagents per year worldwide.

The 1994 founded Landwind Medical is a health care company with 700 employees who export medical software as well as medical instruments, such as ultrasounds and analytical devices e.g. in the field hematology and clinical chemistry in over 130 countries.

The fairly young Bioperfectus Technology (founded 2011) is an in-vitro diagnostics company which distributes over 350 reagents with a strong focus on real-time PCR. The 300 person strong team also offers diverse analytical devices.

The last Chinese company to present was also founded in 2010. New Value is a Shanghai based company who offers different products in the field of chronic wound care.

Under the moderation of Dr. Christoph Block four NRW enterprises with great interest in the Chinese market presented their business models.  

Besides the global player Henkel three SME companies had the opportunity to get in direct contact with the Chinese guests. With the production and distribution of artificial skin Dr. Dirk Petersohn presented Henkel’s answer to the since 2013 forbidden toxicology animal trials in the field of cosmetics.

The youngest company, Attyloid, is a spin-off from the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf and was presented by Dr. Andreas Kulawik, who introduced their novel approach to the early diagnostics of neurodegenerative diseases, mainly Alzheimer. The analytical procedure will be extended to other indications in the future.

Dr. Mirko Stange from miacom diagnostics introduced his point of care tests for the fast analysis of pneumonia and sepsis infections.

The last talk was given by Dr. Sabine Arnolds from Profil, a Neuss based CRO specialized on diabetes.
She presented results from recent studies with the so-called “closed loop system”, which focuses on the development of an artificial pancreas. The synthetic organ would increase the living quality of Type I diabetics significantly, since the intake of insulin would be automatically.

After the talks the participants followed MLM’s invitation to a small get together and used the opportunity for vivid conversations between the Chinese guests and NRW representatives.