UK-China Personalised Medicine Network
The UK-China Personalised Medicine Network brings together key researchers in Cardiovascular and Inflammatory disease working together to strengthen UK and China?s research landscape.
The Network has the capacity to pool expertise to help drive advances in population genetics and stratified medicine, addressing the translational informatics gap.
Our Partners will work together to establish joint research and teaching programmes, with an aim to develop new targeted healthcare technologies for patient benefit.
We will be hosting a UK- China- Hong Kong Personalised Medicine Mission from the 13-17 Jan 2015.
Click here for event website.
Please get in touch if you are interested in participating or forming research links with our UK and China Partners.
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Cardiovascular
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Inflammation
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Partners
Shanghai- Beijing-Shenzhen- Hong Kong, 2014-2015
Background
Innovation China UK (ICUK) and Science Innovation Network (SIN) China are collaborating to establish a joint UK- China Personalised Medicine Network with 3 disease subgroups in Cancer, Cardiovascular and Inflammatory disease. This collaboration forms part of a three year series of partnering workshops agreed in principle by BIS for GPF funding.
A scoping event was carried out in May 2014 with the Shanghai Technology Transfer & Exchange Office (STTE) in preparation for the 2015 Mission. This was followed the 1st UK-China- Hong Kong (HK) Personalised Medicine Network workshops across three cities of Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong from the 12th -16th January.
Scoping workshop, Shanghai (22nd-24th May 2014)
ICUK worked with STTE to deliver three UK presentations to over 200 attendees at the 15th Shanghai International Forum on Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Industries (22nd -24th May 2014). The UK team (Dr Festy, Prof Deloukas & Prof Fitzgibbon) scoped for sector specific knowledge i.e. key partners, research level and focus in cancer and cardiovascular research.
Included in the ICUK scoping preparation was the ?UK Personalised Medicine Landscape? presentation, giving the Chinese research partners and companies an overview of the UK investments, challenges and opportunities for R&D engagement. Three other site visits took place as listed below:
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Researcher- Topic |
Site Visit/ Partner |
Details & Outcome |
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Deloukas- From association signals to drug targets for cardiovascular disease |
Institute for Nutritional Sciences, Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences |
One-one partnering- Potential for collaboration in the future |
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Chinese National Human Genome Centre Shanghai (CHGC) |
One-one partnering- The quality of the Cardiovascular research was not currently as advanced as the UK team members- no scope for collaboration |
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Fitzgibbon-Personalising Treatment in Germinal Centre Lymphomas |
Novartis |
Presentation to ~10 team members- Novartis is not currently working on this type of Lymphoma, although potential for collaboration in the future |
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Ruijin Hospital/ Jiao Tong University |
Presentation to ~50 team members- The quality of the Ruijin team were excellent. Potential for collaboration in the future |
Conclusion: Although Shanghai has high quality research in the biosciences, the strength of their genetics research is mainly plant focussed. There was less opportunity for collaboration in cardiovascular sciences
The Mission, Beijing- Shenzhen- Hong Kong (12th - 16th January 2015)
The Mission brought together top genetics and bioinformatics researchers, driving research and technology development in personalised medicine, with an aim in creating joint collaborative research, teaching programmes, and promoting knowledge exchanges.
The workshop in Beijing and HK followed a similar format of keynote speeches and individual project presentations in the morning. This was proceeded by partnering on individual collaborations, round table discussions on joint network activity, and a site visit in the afternoon.
The Partnering was partially pre-organised, and delegates were encourage to sign up for specific partnering with delegates before the workshop event.
For the round table discussion, the key organisers and speakers were invited to participate as well as stakeholder organisations.
Site visits were partially pre-organised so that the UK participants could visit the location and meet with the researchers which was most relevant to them.
Beijing workshop
The participants presented to an audience of over 40 attendees. Tim Standbrook, The Consul of Science & Innovation at the British Consulate in Shanghai gave one of the opening speeches and Richard Baker from the Newton fund helpfully concluded the workshop with a presentation on ?China Research and Innovation Partnership Fund?.
Individual site visits: included the Cardiovascular Key State laboratory, Peking University People?s Hospital (HCV), and the Peking University People?s Hospital (Rheumatoid Arthritis).
Group site visit- Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG), Chinese Academy of Science (CAS): The half day site visit was chaired by Changqing Zeng, the director of the CAS Key Laboratory of Genomic and Precision Medicine and attended by several group members who gave a series of short presentations. Informal round table collaborative discussions were held after lab visits to the computing and sequencing centre.
Shenzhen workshop
Group site visits- Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI): The site and lab visit was hosted by Huanming Yang, the President of BGI China, and Ning Li, CEO of BGI Europe. The UK delegates gave a very short informal presentation to the senior BGI attendees followed with an Informal collaborative discussion.
Hong Kong workshop
The workshop was co-hosted by HKU, the largest medical university in HK. The President and Vice-Chancellor HKU, Peter Mathieson, and Esther Blythe, the Deputy Consul General from the HK British Consulate gave the welcoming speech to over 70 delegates attended the event.
Site visits: there were 3 group visits, to HKU to meet with the Assistant Dean (Platform Technologies) and Directors of Research Centres; a small focused group visit of select delegates to meet with Dennis Lo, the Director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Health Sciences at the Chinese University of HK (CUHK) and a smaller partnering site visit to HK Polytechnic University (Bioinformatics).
