Recently, the Shenzhen Municipal People's Government issued the "Shenzhen Biotech Industry Revitalization and Development Plan (2009-2015)" (hereinafter the "Plan"). Centered on the core goal of building the National Biotech Industry Base, the Plan strengthens four key development areas — biomedicine, biopharmaceuticals, agricultural biotech, and environmental biotech — and implements four major initiatives: enhancing innovation capability, advancing international industry cooperation, achieving key industry breakthroughs, and promoting industrial clustering. Among them, stem cell products are listed as one of the key development priorities in the biomedicine field.
For the implementation of the key industry breakthrough initiative, tissue engineering and stem cells are listed among the eight major breakthrough projects. The Plan explicitly proposes advancing the construction of Beike Biotech's stem cell and regenerative medicine industrialization project, establishing and improving the standards and norms for adult stem cells from various sources from laboratory to clinical application, building a comprehensive stem cell bank, and actively introducing tissue engineering industrialization projects as the focus of the tissue engineering and stem cells project. For the innovation capability enhancement initiative, the Tsinghua-Beike Biotech Stem Cell Joint Laboratory will be advanced as a key laboratory. The laboratory was established in October 2007 by Beike Biotech in cooperation with the Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University. By undertaking basic and applied stem cell research, conducting R&D of stem cells and related genetic engineering products and monoclonal antibodies, training teaching and technical personnel for stem cell research, it aims to translate research outcomes related to stem cell technology into practice and to achieve leapfrog development for Shenzhen in the field of stem cell regenerative medicine.
The Plan proposes that the biotech industry will become another new leading industry in the world economy after the information industry, and that Shenzhen should be built into a major biotech industry base in China and even worldwide. By 2015, the staged target is for the biotech industry to achieve annual sales revenue of about 200 billion yuan, becoming a high-tech pillar industry of Shenzhen, with about 3 leading enterprises with annual sales revenue exceeding 10 billion yuan, about 50 enterprises exceeding 1 billion yuan, and about 200 enterprises exceeding 100 million yuan.
Beike Biotech will take this as an opportunity to firmly implement the Plan, pursue independent innovation, achieve key breakthroughs, fully leverage its technological and industrialization advantages, and advance the industrialization of stem cells in Shenzhen and across China.
Full text of the "Shenzhen Biotech Industry Revitalization and Development Plan (2009-2015)":
http://www.sz.gov.cn/zfgb/2009/gb669/200909/t20090923_1205315.htm
