Ramon Cajal, winner of the 1906 Nobel Prize, said: "As long as the mysteries of the brain are revealed, the universe will remain a mystery." "Brain science research is the last frontier of life science, and scientists have never stopped exploring it.
It is estimated that 1 in 4 families worldwide suffer from a brain disorder. At present, some progress has been made in the research of brain diseases around the world, but the drugs and medical equipment required for the diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases in China are more advanced than those imported, and domestic innovative drugs and independent research and development instruments need to be developed urgently.
Founded in October 2019, Beijing Kunmai Medical Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Kunmai Medical") is committed to the development and production of a new generation of high-end functional magnetic imaging equipment with quantum weak magnetic sensing and imaging as a technical means. With the self-developed new generation of optically pumped magnetometer (OPM) as the core, Kunmai Medical has built a technical closed-loop including precision weak field detection, high-efficiency magnetic shielding, and high-resolution magnetic inversion, and has a complete R&D, production, installation, and service industry chain. The self-developed helium-free quantum magnetoencephalography device can detect and image brain neural activity in real time without trauma and radiation. With the goal of providing accurate and quantitative diagnosis and treatment solutions for mental and neurological diseases, Kunmai Medical is committed to becoming an innovator and pioneer of clinical application of magnetic encephalography technology, benefiting hundreds of millions of patients with brain diseases.
At present, Kunmai Medical's new generation of liquid helium-free quantum magnetoencephalography system has achieved scientific research installation and application, and it is also the first scientific research installation of OPM magnetoencephalography in China. In the future, the disruptive R&D achievements and core products will be widely used in cutting-edge fields such as clinical brain disease diagnosis, brain science research, and brain-computer interface, effectively filling the gap of independent intellectual property rights of related technologies in China and breaking the foreign monopoly of high-end imaging equipment with weak magnetic fields.
Talking about his entrepreneurial experience, Sheng Jingwei used a word "the ignorant are fearless".
Sheng Jingwei graduated from Sichuan University with a bachelor's degree in nuclear physics, and later went to Peking University to study for a doctorate in medical physics and engineering, under the supervision of Professor Gao Jiahong of the School of Physics.
Professor Gao Jiahong is an expert in the field of brain imaging, having studied brain imaging technology in the United States for nearly 30 years, but he has not made a good breakthrough in the most difficult topic of neural current magnetic field detection.
Perhaps because newborn calves are not afraid of tigers, Sheng Jingwei took the initiative to find Professor Gao Jiahong and wanted to challenge this difficult topic, so he also became the first member of the quantum magnetoencephalography research and development team of Peking University.
Later, we selected quantum manipulation technology for magnetic encephalography detection, and won the special funding of major scientific research instruments from the National ** Committee. When I was about to graduate, we also completed the construction of the prototype of the equipment, and as a scientific research project, we could submit the paper in advance. Sheng Jingwei recalled.
With such a smooth academic career, why did Sheng Jingwei embark on the road of entrepreneurship?This is inseparable from Professor Gao Jiahong.
Sheng Jingwei said frankly: "To be honest, when I was a student, I never regarded entrepreneurship as the main direction of life development, I originally planned to go to the United States for further study, or to engage in scientific research in some domestic universities and research institutes. ”
However, Professor Gao Jiahong's words changed the trajectory of Sheng Jingwei's life. "I have published a lot of ** in top journals such as "Science" and "Nature", but unfortunately I have not realized the transformation of scientific research achievements of quantum magnetoencephalography, I hope you can make Chinese's own scientific research achievements land and make resounding national products." Sheng Jingwei was deeply touched and weighed it again and again, after graduating from his doctorate in 2018, he embarked on the road of entrepreneurship with enthusiasm and established Kunmai Medical.
Starting a business is not a trick. As a "novice" without any entrepreneurial experience, Sheng Jingwei faces new challenges every day. The first challenge he encountered was that he had no experience in company registration and operation. Since the company was just established, everything had to rely on himself, in order to do industrial and commercial registration and social security registration, Sheng Jingwei was busy, but forgot to pay the provident fund to himself, until the end of 2019 after being reminded by a colleague to realize it.
For start-ups, reaching their first customer is often the hardest. On the one hand, the company is relatively small;On the other hand, without resource endorsement, it is difficult for customers to make intuitive judgments on the value of the company's products.
Kunmai Medical is even more special, its products are medical devices, which are still in clinical registration and cannot be applied in clinical practice. However, brain science research is also a key direction of magnetoencephalography application, Kunmai Medical has a number of orders in the direction of scientific research, and has participated in several major national infrastructure construction projects, such as deeply involved in the West China Hospital of Sichuan University of the national major scientific and technological infrastructure of translational medicine, and installed the first quantum magnetoencephalography system in China in the Clinical Magnetic Resonance Research Center of West China Hospital, and has carried out a number of scientific research and preclinical research tasks in the field of psychiatric imaging.
According to Sheng Jingwei, in order to win the order of West China Hospital, he suffered a lot. At that time, they had just completed a prototype, and West China Hospital was very interested in it, and in order to explain the latest technology to the doctors of West China Hospital, Sheng Jingwei flew back and forth to Sichuan no less than ten times. In the bidding, Sheng Jingwei led the team to stay up late to fill in the bidding documents, check them word by word, and even miss the punctuation, and finally Kunmai Medical's first installed product was successfully run in the hospital.
Hard work pays off. With the sudden rise of quantum magnetoencephalography in recent years, Kunmai Medical has obtained tens of millions of yuan in scientific research orders. At the same time, some foreign experts and institutions are also interested in the core technology and products of Kunmai Medical, and have the intention of cooperation, and when the conditions are ripe, Kunmai Medical is also considering entering the international market.
The human brain is known as the "forbidden area of life", and the slightest damage may cause life-threatening injuries, and the brain structure is complex, and diseases such as epilepsy, depression, autism, and Alzheimer's disease have also been plaguing human beings. If you want to open the window of the "forbidden area of life", you can't do without advanced brain imaging technology.
Common brain imaging techniques in clinical practice include electroencephalogram, CT, magnetic resonance, etc., but these techniques have their own limitations. For example, EEG is often said to require the patient to wear a "hat" to observe the brain's electrical activity, but it is difficult for electrical signals to pass through the skull, and the signal is severely attenuated and distorted, making it difficult to judge accurately**. CT, MRI and other technologies use the brain to take pictures of the brain, but many brain diseases do not show obvious features on structural images.
In order to make up for the limitations of traditional brain imaging technology, in recent years, with the development of technology, people have begun to use non-invasive and radiation-free magnetoencephalography equipment that can detect real-time neural activity of the brain in vitro.
According to Sheng Jingwei, if CT and MRI are compared to "brain cameras", then magnetoencephalography equipment is a "camera", which can track the bioelectromagnetic field generated by neuronal excitation in real time to monitor changes in brain neural activity.
Magnetoencephalography can be used in the diagnosis of brain diseases, brain dynamic imaging, brain function area localization, children's brain development, new brain-computer interfaces and other fields. In clinical diagnosis and treatment, the application of magnetoencephalography mainly includes the localization of brain functional areas before cranial surgery, the determination of brain function damage, and the localization of epilepsy lesions. In addition, magnetoencephalography also has important applications in the diagnosis and early screening of subtypes of mental diseasesClinical research on depression and autism has also made some progress in the international industry. In brain science research, magnetoencephalography can conduct a wide range of basic scientific research for healthy people and specific subject groups, and can also be integrated with common EEG, FNIRS and other technologies for multimodal brain imaging to carry out brain functional imaging research.
So how does magnetoencephalography technology work?
The ionic currents in the nerves and muscle tissues of the human body will produce an external magnetic field, and according to the different organs that produce the magnetic field, the human biomagnetic field is divided into brain magnetic field, cardiac magnetic field, muscle magnetic field, etc. Among them, magnetoencephalography technology, which detects and analyzes magnetic encephalography signals, has attracted the attention of scholars in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and brain medicine.
The magnetic encephalogram is very weak, about one billionth of the Earth's magnetic field, making it difficult to detect. Magnetoencephalography is a non-invasive and safe brain imaging device, which can present the live image of neurons in the brain in real time with high spatiotemporal resolution. At present, most of the magnetoencephalography used in China is the superconducting magnetoencephalography imported from abroad, ** as high as 2000-30 million, which needs to be equipped with a special magnetic shielding room, and in order to maintain an ultra-low temperature environment, it is also necessary to use liquid helium as a strategic resource, and the annual maintenance cost alone is as high as one million. In addition, the helmet of imported superconducting magnetoencephalography is not enough to fit the Asian head shape.
In order to break through the bottleneck of superconducting magnetoencephalography, Kunmai Medical has independently developed and produced a new generation of liquid helium-free quantum magnetoencephalography, which is based on quantum sensing atomic magnetometer technology, which uses the interaction between light and quantum to detect magnetic fields, and the principle is completely different from traditional superconducting technology. Quantum magnetoencephalography can be detected at room temperature, without the need for liquid helium, and the detector can be close to the scalp to capture a stronger EEG signal.
More importantly, Kunmai Medical's new generation of quantum magnetoencephalography can reduce the number of ultraconducting magnetoencephalography to about half, and if the production line is expanded to further solidify the process in the future, it may be pressed even lower.
The cost reduction is due to the company's continuous innovation. "For science and technology enterprises, innovation is the lifeline. Sheng Jingwei emphasized.
Since its establishment, Kunmai Medical has not simply developed tools to detect brain signals, but has created a set of independent non-invasive brain functional imaging solutions that meet clinical needs.
For example, the main development of wearable magnetoencephalography in Europe requires patients to be confined in a closed space, although it is more free to move, it is more expensive to build, and the implementation process is more like scientific research equipment, which is difficult to promote in clinical practice. Kunmai Medical's products use a capsule similar to MRI, where the patient only needs to lie down in the capsule for scanning, so that the environment is relatively controllable, the performance is more stable, and it is more in line with the clinical scene. In addition, the installation speed of the capsule magnetoencephalography device is fast, it only takes about a week, and it has a better degree of promotion.
With its excellent technical strength, Kunmai Medical has won many honors: domestic high-end equipment scientific research demonstration application, the third prize of the Hicool 2023 Global Entrepreneurship Competition, the TOP10 of the Zhongguancun International Frontier Science and Technology Innovation Competition, the gold medal of the national competition of the "Internet +" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, etc., and as the only selected enterprise in the field of medical devices in 2021, it undertook the Beijing Zhongguancun disruptive technology research and development and achievement transformation project.
In recent years, the country has invested heavily in "hard technology" and vigorously developed independent domestic high-end medical equipment, and at the same time, the national "14th Five-Year Plan" has also made a key scientific research field layout for brain science and brain-like research.
In 2020, before the company was put into large-scale operation, Kunmai Medical received an angel round investment of tens of millions of yuan from Capital Science and Technology Development Group, "They not only helped the company choose a location, but also provided some policy support for intellectual property rights." "In 2022, Kunmai Medical will complete tens of millions of yuan in Pre-A round of financing, led by Renac Technology Group and followed by FreeS Capital. These financings support the company's development and enable the company to build a team that integrates outstanding talents from different disciplines to rapidly advance the engineering and industrialization process of quantum magnetoencephalography.
At present, the company has a team of more than 50 people, the core team is from top universities at home and abroad and the world's top 500 enterprises, R&D and engineering-related technical personnel account for about 80%, covering all aspects of production, education, research and medicine, and is the earliest technical team engaged in OPM magnetoencephalography in China.
Not only that, in 2020, Kunmai Medical successfully landed on the Beijing Stock Exchange Innovation Board and officially entered the capital market, which also brought some substantial benefits to Kunmai Medical.
Under the wave of "mass entrepreneurship and innovation", ** and all walks of life have provided a series of preferential policies for college students to start their own businesses. According to relevant statistics, in 2016, nearly eighty percent of colleges and universities issued a number of incentive policies and supporting documents for innovation and entrepreneurship education, and more than 70% of colleges and universities also carried out relevant teaching reforms. Also in June of this year, the Beijing Municipal Growth Enterprise Market for College Students, jointly built by the Beijing Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau and the Beijing Stock Exchange, was officially launched.
Sheng Jingwei said to Chuangtoutiao: "The Beijing Stock Exchange Innovation Board not only provides a platform for start-ups to show, but also provides us with financing docking services, and at the same time, they also organize a series of activities such as 'entering the Beijing Stock Exchange' and 'entering the Shenzhen Stock Exchange', so that we can have a clearer understanding of the listing rules." ”
As a member of the entrepreneurial army of college students, Sheng Jingwei has more expectations for the Beijing Stock Exchange University Innovation Board, "The most important thing for young technology-based start-ups is talents, and I hope that the Dachuang Board will give more policy support and guidance in the introduction and settlement of talents in the future." ”
About the Beijing Equity Exchange Center College Students' Growth Enterprise Market
On June 30, 2016, the college student entrepreneurship service platform and the Beijing University Student Growth Enterprise Market were officially launched by the Beijing Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau and the Beijing Equity Exchange Center, and co-built by Tsinghua University, Peking University, Beijing University of Technology, and Haidian District People's University. In December 2021, the Beijing Equity Exchange Center, together with 12 units including the Beijing University Student Employment and Entrepreneurship Guidance Center, jointly established the Beijing University Student Growth Enterprise Market Incubation and Cultivation Base. In December 2022, Beijing Equity Exchange Center and Shunxi** jointly established the "Beijing College Student Entrepreneurship Green Ivy Program" to help more student entrepreneurship projects achieve a breakthrough from "0 to 1" by helping enterprises with financing.
Relying on the functional positioning of the regional equity market, and adhering to the service concept of "entrepreneurship drives employment and capital supports innovation", the GEM for college students has established a new model of "first-class university + park + market + capital" for the whole chain of college students' entrepreneurship tracking service, providing graduate start-up enterprises (including returnees from studying abroad) with policy services such as talent policy and talent recruitment, as well as incubation and cultivation, financing services, entrepreneurship diagnosis, Standardized development and professional capital market services such as transfer to the board are aimed at motivating and supporting graduate entrepreneurial groups to better innovate and start businesses in Beijing. As of the end of September 2023, the number of enterprises exhibited on the GEM of Beijing college students has reached 303, including 38 specialized and special new enterprises (including 5 "little giant" enterprises), with a registered capital of more than 2.1 billion yuan, a cumulative financing amount of more than 7.5 billion yuan, and more than 6,000 jobs.