From a small surgical suture needle to robot-assisted anesthesia, and to the development and production of various medical equipment, these are all big health issues that matter to a country's development and its people's lives.
Facing a dilemma that China has been heavily relying on importing medical equipment, especially those high-end medical equipment, the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST) and the School of Medicine of Shanghai Jiaotong University have recently taken the initiative to host the forum of "Medical Science and Engineering Cross-Innovation in a Post-pandemic Era" with Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology and SIMIC Holdings, and the four parties have signed an agreement to collaboratively build an "Medical Equipment Innovation and Transferring Platform." The platform will pool together resources from universities, businesses, hospitals, regulation authorities, and research institutes, conduct cross-disciplinary research based on the urgent needs of medical care, focus on developing high-end medical equipment or materials that we urgently need in clinical medicine but heavily rely on imports, and make major breakthrough in core medical equipment technology, creating a closed industrial loop for medical equipment production that starts from hospitals, then universities, research institutes, businesses, and ends again at hospitals.
According to USST, the university's focus is on three major development areas that include integrated circuit, artificial intelligence, and biomedicine, and the university will leverage its strengths in certain disciplines to promote the interdisciplinary development of medicine and engineering and facilitate the transferring of industrial outcomes. Drawing from the resources of the two universities and two organizations, the platform will quicken its pace in developing core technology and overcome the "bottleneck" issue, entering a new stage of combining the strengths of universities, businesses, and research institutes to facilitate the practical application of technology, while helping the swift transferring of medicine and engineering interdisciplinary outcomes. With great support from Yangpu District and Shanghai City, a blueprint of an industrial belt of medical equipment is unfolding around USST. A complete chain of medicine and engineering interdisciplinary innovation will certainly rise as an industrial supply system with distinct features and strong functions, pushing China's medical equipment development to a new direction of high-end production, and refined and quality products, and protecting Chinese people's health and lives.
According the person-in-charge of Yangpu District, Yangpu District is currently taking its regional advantage in higher education and science resources, exploring the methods of unleashing the innovation potential of higher education institutions and research institutes, and planning the layout of the industrial chain based on the innovation chain. It is Yangpu District's hope that the platform can help establish a new model of cross-disciplinary innovation between universities, businesses and research institutes for medical equipment production, and further the collaboration between the district and the universities, helping Yangpu become a source of science and technology innovation in Shanghai, and even China, and contributing wisdom and strength to Shanghai becoming "a global hub of science and innovation." The development of high-end medical equipment involves disciplines such as clinical medicine, optical engineering, biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, and materials science and engineering, and the complexity of cross-disciplinary problems requires the combination of medicine and engineering.
Last September, USST and the Medicine School of Shanghai Jiaotong University jointly established the "Interdisciplinary Innovation Institute for Medicine and Engineering," which operates by sending direct needs from clinical hospitals in the form of "request forms" to universities, and upon receiving the request forms, universities will form science and research teams to quickly solve these problems. Eight months since its establishment, the Institute has had 5 project that have entered the industrialization period, 14 projects that are in the process of industrialization, and 36 projects that are in the process of development. The Covid-19 pandemic has also highlighted the importance of the Institute. 39 collaboration projects have been raised by the affiliated hospitals of the School of Medicine of Shanghai Jiaotong University with the USST, and were responded swiftly. As the leader of the integrated circuit industry in Shanghai, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology has partnered with SIMIC Holdings to venture into the medical industry, focusing on the transferring and application of core technology such as sensors in medical equipment area.
The joint establishment of the medical equipment innovation and transferring platform has met the needs of a new global wave of technological revolution and industrial transformation, and is a strategic win in the development of the big health industry. It will also add industrial power to the subsequent medicine-engineering interdisciplinary projects for their quick taking-offs.