The medical equipment valley in Jiading District of Shanghai, known as Shanghai MedValley, is a powerhouse of medical innovation. As an industrial park centred on creative medical equipment development, the valley has gathered a cluster of high-end medical device enterprises and highly qualified professionals. It aims to promote new quality productive forces in the medical field, with a focus on developing devices for advanced diagnosis and highly effective treatment. It is home to seven major research institutions and joint labs, including a medical robot training centre and a medical chip research institute. 

The concept of new quality productive forces refers to initiatives aimed at enhancing productivity, innovation, sustainability and quality in different sectors of the economy through technological innovation including digital transformation. 

Doctors and nurses are a major force behind medical innovation in the valley. “There are lots of unresolved problems in the medical field, and doctors and nurses are on the frontline of assessing patients’ needs,” Ning Guang, head of Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai, said. “Eventually, the achievements of the medical industry need to be tested through practice. Therefore, doctors should be given a chance to steer innovation within the industry.”  

Frontline ideas 

The valley’s doctor-directed medical innovation model has yielded positive results in recent years. 

The non-invasive blood glucose detector developed by Wang Weiqing, director of the Endocrine and Metabolism Department at Ruijin Hospital, together with a medical chip technology enterprise, has been clinically validated to meet the international standard for glucose detectors. 

Niu Chuanxin, a researcher from the Rehabilitation Department of Ruijin Hospital, has collaborated with enterprises within the cognitive rehabilitation field and launched more than 30 products that meet patients’ needs with high-level accuracy and flexibility, including a robot that helps patients to recover control over their upper limbs. 

Chen Saijuan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, made breakthroughs in gene-based therapy for haemophilia, a rare disorder that prevents blood from clotting. Previously, patients of the disease had to undergo regular plasma transfusions, and the treatment could be hampered by shortages of plasma. Chen’s breakthroughs mean patients now only require one-off or occasional treatments. 

The single-port laparoscopic surgical robot jointly developed by Beijing Surgerii Robotics Co. Ltd. and Ruijin Hospital allows for various complex surgeries through a skin incision of less than 3 cm on the patient’s abdomen. 

“Shanghai MedValley has gathered a large group of doctors with pioneering ideas, who seek to cooperate with enterprises to achieve breakthroughs in medical equipment development and large-scale production, drawing on their clinical experiences,” Ning said. 

In the past three years, medical staff of Ruijin Hospital have applied for more than 1,000 patents. “We’ve been thinking about the role of large public hospitals in the development of new quality productive forces,” Ning added. “And our answer is to highlight the non-profit nature of public hospitals, encouraging and cultivating public medical staff as the powerhouse of creative work to further promote the development of medical industries.” 

The biomedical industry is one of the top three pioneering industries in Shanghai, alongside the integrated circuits and artificial intelligence industries, and a key industry for developing new quality productive forces. The annual scale of the biopharmaceutical industry reached 933.73 billion yuan ($128.68 billion) in 2023, an increase of 4.9 percent, according to a press conference on Shanghai’s high-quality development held on 22 May. 

“The new creative Class III medical equipment developed by institutions in Shanghai accounted for 16.67 percent of those in China,” Ge Dongbo, an official from Shanghai, told the press, adding that the local government is stepping up efforts to enhance the mechanisms that benefit creative enterprises and institutions and facilitate the industrialisation of creative ideas. 

Class III medical equipment is high-risk equipment that is very important to health or sustaining life, such as devices for transplanting artificial organs and cardiac pacemakers, which are under strict supervision of quality inspection agencies.

Advanced domestic technology 

Medical innovation is vibrant not only within Shanghai MedValley, but also in medical centres in surrounding areas focusing on specialty treatment technologies. The proton therapy centre at Ruijin Hospital, located close to MedValley, is renowned for its high-end tumour treatment technologies. 

Proton therapy is a powerful tool for precision radiotherapy in cancer treatment. It has advantages over traditional radiotherapy technologies in terms of accuracy, therapeutic effects, and less harm to patients, making it the most advanced medical technology in the world to combat tumours. In the past, domestic proton treatment relied on imported equipment, leading to high costs and low access to proton therapy in many regions of China. 

“Proton therapy equipment is huge in size and has high manufacturing, operating and maintenance costs,” Chen Jiayi, head of the Radiotherapy Department of Ruijin Hospital, said. “If we simply relied on imported equipment instead of mastering the core technology for producing the equipment by ourselves, it would be difficult to reduce the costs [for patients].” 

“In the past, the cost of proton therapy was about 300,000 yuan ($41,345) – too heavy a financial burden for many patients. As a result, many patients for whom proton therapy was suitable chose to undergo X-ray therapy instead,” Chen Jiayi added. 

Construction began on the building for housing domestic proton devices at the north campus of Ruijin Hospital in December 2014. 

Soon after, Ruijin Hospital formed a qualified team including physicians, technicians, physicists, researchers, and other personnel, to overcome difficulties the project faced. 

Ruijin Hospital worked with the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics and Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, both under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as well as Shanghai APACTRON Particle Equipment Co. Ltd., to jointly develop domestically produced proton therapy systems. 

On 24 November 2023, the first domestically produced proton therapy test device in the 180-degree rotation beam therapy room was put into use. As of March this year, the number of patients receiving proton therapy had reached 100. So far, the proton therapy device at Ruijin Hospital has treated patients for more than 20 different types of tumours and all patients have shown ideal short-term results. 

The 360-degree proton therapy system, a more advanced device developed by Ruijin Hospital and Shanghai APACTRON Particle Equipment Co., is expected to be put into clinical use this year. The 360-degree rotating frame can provide an all-around treatment angle to strike the tumour target area and protect surrounding normal tissues without moving the patient. The domestic proton therapy system currently costs a maximum of 170,000 yuan ($23,429) per course of treatments. 

According to Chen Jiayi, in addition to making significant breakthroughs in hardware, the proton therapy personnel are consistently exploring and enriching, through trial and error, their experience in proton treatment, aiming to independently develop an optimised proton therapy plan. 

“We have developed a meticulous set of technology and management solutions that can be directly packaged and applied to any hospital in the country,” she said.

Self-reliance equipment 

High-end medical equipment are an important manifestation of China’s independent technological innovation capability. In recent years, China has continuously developed world-class high-end medical equipment with independent intellectual property rights. The high-end medical equipment industry has not only achieved full independent research and development, but also reduced China’s reliance on imports and has even exported its products to multiple countries and regions around the world, winning overseas recognition. 

United Imaging, a Shanghai-based private enterprise founded in 2011, has developed a series of medical imaging and radiotherapy products and life science instruments, and provides medical digitisation and medical artificial intelligence solutions. 

The world’s first 2-metre PET-CT, the world’s first whole-body ultra-high field 5.0T MRI, the world’s first 75-cm ultra-large aperture 3.0T MRI … Cutting-edge medical devices adorn the 1,500-square-metre exhibition hall of United Imaging. Since 2014, the company has launched 78 products with fully independent intellectual property rights.  

China’s self-developed medical equipment also brings benefits to people around the world. United Imaging exports a series of high-end medical imaging equipment to more than 70 countries and regions, including the US, Japan, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, India and Republic of Korea. It serves more than 13,100 medical institutions. 

According to data from the General Administration of Customs, the total export value of medical devices of China reached over 484.3 billion yuan ($69.1 billion) in 2023, with medical equipment exports increasing by 5.4 percent year on year and 54.8 percent compared to 2019.

African Times published this article in partnership with ChinAfrica Magazine