The medical equipment valley in Jiading District of Shanghai, known as Shanghai MedValley, is a powerhouse of medical innovation. As an industrial park centered 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 center and a medical chip research institute.
New quality productive forces refer 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 in 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,” Ning noted
Medical equipment of United Imaging in Cintocare Hospital of South Africa.
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 with high-level accuracy and flexibility, including a robot that helps patients to recover control of their upper limbs.
Chen Saijuan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, made a breakthrough in gene-based therapy for haemophilia, a rare disorder that prevents blood from clotting. Previously, haemophilia patients had to have regular plasma transfusions, and the treatment could be hampered by shortage of plasma. Chen’s breakthrough means patients now require only a one-off or occasional treatments.
The single-port laparoscopic surgical robot jointly developed by Beijing Surgerii Robotics Co. Ltd. and Ruijin Hospital enables complex surgeries through a skin incision of less than 3 cm in 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, the medical staff of Ruijin Hospital 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 said. “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 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 RMB 933.73 billion (US $128.68 billion) in 2023, an increase of 4.9 percent, according to a press conference on Shanghai’s high-quality development held on May 22.
“The new creative third-category 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 industrialization of creative ideas.
Third-category 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 and examination by quality inspection agencies.
A surgical robot developed by Chinese tech companies peels raw quail eggs at the Shanghai MedValley Innovative Medical Equipment Industrial Park on May 24. Xia Yuanyuan
Proton Therapy
Medical innovation is vibrant not only within Shanghai MedValley, but also in medical centers 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 tumors. 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.
“The 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 RMB 300,000 (US $41,345) – too heavy a financial burden for many patients. As a result, many patients who needed proton therapy chose to undergo X-ray therapy instead,” Chen Jiayi added.
In December 2014, a building for housing domestic proton devices at the north campus of Ruijin Hospital started construction.
Meanwhile, Ruijin Hospital formed a team of physicians, technicians, physicists, researchers, and other personnel for the project.
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. to jointly develop domestically produced proton therapy systems.
On November 24, 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 tumors 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. Ltd., 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 tumor target area and protect surrounding normal tissues without moving the patient. The domestic proton therapy system currently costs a maximum of RMB 170,000 (US $23,429) per course of treatment.
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 optimized 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.
Chen Chang, head of the Medical Chip Research Center at Ruijin Hospital, an affiliated hospital of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, introduces the chip used in the hospital’s non-invasive blood glucose detector in Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai on May 24.
Home-Made Equipment
High-end medical equipment is an important manifestation of China’s independent technological innovation capability. In recent years, China has 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 can provide medical digitization and medical artificial intelligence solutions.
The world’s first 2-meter 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 Group. Since 2014, the company has launched 78 products with fully independent intellectual property rights in the market.
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 U.S., Japan, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, India and the Republic of Korea. It serves more than 13,100 medical institutions, covering about one-third of the Belt and Road countries.
According to data from the General Administration of Customs, the total export value of medical devices of China reached over RMB 484.3 billion (US $69.1 billion) in 2023, with medical equipment exports increasing by 5.4 percent year on year and 54.8 percent compared to 2019.
