When you have taken blood from any tertiary hospital in China and are ready to do thyroid function, cardiovascular and other tests, you may not know that your blood sample may be tested and analyzed by a chemiluminescence analyzer developed and produced by Pingshan, a listed biomedical company in Shenzhen.
This company, called New Industry Biotechnology, is located next to Jinxiu East Road, Pingshan District, which has the title of "BT Avenue" (Biotechnology, referred to as BT, biotechnology) in Shenzhen, and is a leading enterprise in the field of immunodiagnosis in China. Busy R&D and production scenarios can be seen everywhere, such as the continuous operation of the instruments in the reagent R&D center for reagent testing, the installation and debugging of automatic biochemical analysis instruments and other flagship products of the instrument production center.
New industrial biology. Photo courtesy of the interviewee.
Walking along this "BT Avenue", you can see that there are many biomedical enterprises and professional parks on both sides, a number of listed companies "live next to each other", and countless drugs and medical devices that can improve human health are developed and broken through here, which is the epitome of the high-quality development of the biomedical industry in Pingshan and even Shenzhen.
Calling people for meetings when climbing a mountain? Pingshan listed companies have enough "volume" to achieve technological breakthroughs
Once upon a time, domestic chemiluminescence immunoassay products were highly dependent on imports, especially in the 90s of the last century, the first to do a chemiluminescence immunoassay ranged from 80 to several hundred yuan, which is equivalent to a month's salary. How to let people see a doctor and do testing for less money? The choice of new industrial biology is to deepen the cultivation of luminescence immunoassay to achieve technological breakthroughs and import substitution.
Founded in Shenzhen in 1995, from a team of more than a dozen people to a listed company with a market value of nearly 60 billion yuan, New Industry Biology has broken through the "stuck neck" problem all the way, and successfully introduced China's first fully automatic chemiluminescence immunoassay analyzer and supporting reagents to the market in 2010, filling the gap in the field in China at that time. Today, New Industry Biology has 327 patents, including 140 invention patents, which can provide customers with a rich menu of chemiluminescence reagent items, and has also customized and developed the first fully automated reagent filling production line in China, achieving a reagent production capacity of 9 million boxes per year, and is the only company in the world that has four major technology platforms for the research and development of nanomagnetic microspheres, reagent raw materials, luminescence reagents, and automatic chemiluminescence immunoassay instrument research and development.
The process of realizing technology from zero to excellent is like a game, tiring but happy. Recalling the process of researching the first domestic fully automatic chemiluminescence immunoassay analyzer, Yin Li, director of R&D of new industry instruments, said frankly that there were only more than 10 people in the instrument R&D team at that time, but everyone's working state was "more than '996' and '996'", even in climbing the mountain and walking, they were thinking about how to break through the technical difficulties, and they would stop halfway when they had inspiration, and called the team members to meet and discuss, "everyone is very motivated."
At first, Yin Li was responsible for the design of the central control unit of the instrument and was one of the core members of the R&D team. Different from his previous work experience as a laboratory technician at Shenzhen University, because the instruments and equipment need to be constantly updated and iterated, this means that it is common for him and his teammates to encounter technical bottlenecks.
For example, since 2015, we have been researching the company's flagship product, Maglumi X8 (hereinafter referred to as X8), and have made many repeated attempts on how to improve the speed and performance, and finally made technological breakthroughs in the fields of high-speed micropipetting and high-speed magnetic separation and cleaning. Yin Li said that the flagship product X8, which was launched in 2019, is the world's fastest automatic chemiluminescence immunoassay analyzer, with a maximum speed of 600 test hours, making it the world's fastest single-machine chemiluminescence instrument when the product is launched.
With the continuous installation of X8 in large and medium-sized hospitals in China, the pain point of the long time for hospitals to produce diagnostic results has been solved. Zhang Lei, deputy general manager and secretary of the board of directors of the new industry, mentioned that the increase in the market share of domestic chemiluminescence immunodetection products has broken the market monopoly of overseas giants in this field, which is conducive to "forcing the price of imported products" to reduce prices, so that Chinese people can enjoy high-quality and affordable chemiluminescence immunodetection services, "We have explored overseas markets since the products were introduced to the market in 2010, and the current overseas revenue is close to one-third of the company's overall revenue."
"BT Avenue" has created nearly ninety percent of Pingshan's biomedical output value, and there are 14 listed companies
We moved our headquarters to Pingshan in 2014 and have watched this area develop in the past 10 years. Zhang Lei said with emotion that when she first arrived in Pingshan, there were only more than 100 biomedical companies in the district, and now there are more than 200 near the company alone, "developing rapidly".
Jinxiu East Road, Pingshan District, where the new industrial biology is located, is about 36 kilometers, known as Shenzhen's "BT Avenue". It is one of the most concentrated areas in Shenzhen's biomedical industry, with more than 200 biomedical companies such as Sanofi Pasteur and Sanofi Pasteur, including 14 parent companies such as New Industry Biotechnology and Lipon Precision and their production bases in Pingshan, as well as 13 professional parks such as Shenzhen Biomedical Innovation Industrial Park (Accelerator Phase I) and Shenzhen-Hong Kong Biomedical Industrial Park.
Shenzhen "BT Avenue". Photo courtesy of Pingshan Rong ** Center.
It has the first batch of national bio-industry bases in the country and the only one in Shenzhen, as well as platforms such as the Guangdong Medical Device Quality Supervision and Inspection Institute (Shenzhen) and the Greater Bay Area International Vaccine Innovation Center. In addition, in recent years, Pingshan has continuously improved its industrial facilities, attracting more and more innovative elements such as biomedical enterprises, platforms, and talents to gather here, and even the new industrial biology that has been rooted here for 10 years has successfully applied for the fourth phase of land in Pingshan due to its development and growth, totaling about 750,000 square meters for the construction of R&D bases, production bases, headquarters bases and overseas marketing centers.
According to the data, "BT Avenue" will create a total output value of nearly 23 billion yuan in biomedicine in 2023, accounting for about 89% of the total output value of the biomedical industry in the region. Many enterprises and parks have also frequently won "national" honors. For example, Shenzhen (Pingshan) National Biological Industry Base was listed as a key park in the "China Biomedical Industry Development Index" last year, and four companies including New Industry Biology also won the China Patent Excellence Award.
Pingshan has gathered more than 1,100 biomedical enterprises, and the whole chain ecosystem of "research to production" has gradually formed
The development of Shenzhen's "BT Avenue" is a footnote to the take-off of Pingshan's biomedical industry. As the "core agglomeration area" of Shenzhen's biomedical industry, Pingshan has listed biomedicine as one of the three leading industries for the key development of the district. After years of cultivation, the biomedical industry chain in the jurisdiction has become increasingly complete, the advantages of agglomeration have gradually become prominent, and the momentum of high-quality development has become stronger and stronger.
Pingshan is the "core agglomeration area" of Shenzhen's biomedical industry. Photo courtesy of Pingshan Rong ** Center.
By the end of 2023, there are 1,143 biomedical enterprises and 105 biomedical enterprises in the district, accounting for more than a quarter of the city's total number of biomedical production enterprises. The whole region has formed an advanced manufacturing cluster of the biomedical industry with biological innovative drugs, high-end medical devices and biotechnology as the main body, and the whole chain ecosystem of "R&D + transformation + production" in the field of biomedicine has gradually formed, and "Pingshan is the first choice for biomedicine" has become the consensus of more and more people in the industry. In December last year, at the 2023 Shenzhen Global Investment Conference, Guo Guangchang, Chairman of Fosun International, said that he would land Fosun Pharma's Greater Bay Area headquarters in Pingshan, Shenzhen.
The remarkable achievements in industrial development are closely related to the package of measures launched by Shenzhen and Pingshan in industrial planning, policy support, and industrial space. In 2022, Shenzhen issued the "Opinions on the Development and Expansion of Strategic Emerging Industrial Clusters and the Cultivation and Development of Future Industries" and the "Shenzhen Action Plan for Cultivating and Developing Biomedical Industry Clusters (2022-2025)" to lay out and develop "20+8" industrial clusters. Among them, the three strategic emerging industrial clusters of biomedicine, high-end medical devices and big health, as well as the two future industrial clusters of cell and gene and brain science, are focused on Pingshan. As early as 2017, Pingshan also introduced a special support policy for the biological industry, which is one of the jurisdictions with the earliest introduction time, the widest range of support and the largest funding. In recent years, the municipal and district levels have continued to increase their support for the biomedical industry, and the first phase of Shenzhen's biomedical industry with a scale of 5 billion yuan has landed in Pingshan.
According to statistics, from 2022 to 2025, Pingshan District will accelerate the completion of the supply of industrial space required by the biomedical industry, and plan to build 21 biomedical industry space projects by accelerating the transfer of reserve land, encouraging enterprises to increase capacity and efficiency, and accelerating the construction of projects under construction, with an additional construction area of about 3 million square meters and a total area of about 1.09 million square meters. At the same time, Pingshan is constantly driving the small and medium-sized enterprises in the upstream and downstream of the relevant industrial chain to gather here.
Pingshan's work report this year proposes that the "6+3" industrial cluster construction plan will be implemented to promote the iterative upgrading of internationally competitive industries such as intelligent networked vehicles, semiconductors and integrated circuits, high-end medical devices, and biomedicine. Focus on innovative drugs, high-end medical devices and other fields, promote the integration of medical big data platforms in the region, support medical institutions and biopharmaceutical and medical device enterprises to expand application scenarios, and deepen cooperation in the industrialization of clinical research.
A "BT Avenue" strings up the main artery of the industry. How will Pingshan use new industrialization as the engine to promote the high-quality development of the biomedical industry? It's worth the wait.
Written by: Nandu reporter Chen Xinghua