Date: July 6, 2021

Source: International Liaison Department, JNU

Author: Chen Lian, Su Xingchen

The donation ceremony of the JNU-BIOKANGTAI Medical Development Fund was held at JNU, July 9. Last year, JNU signed a strategic cooperation agreement with BIOKANGTAI, a leading Chinese biopharmaceutical company, to jointly promote the construction of biomedical research center. The two parties have carried out multi-faceted and multi-level collaboration in scientific research, talent-training, discipline resources, and industry-university-research bases. 

Both parties will further promote the establishment of the Vaccine Industrial Institute, build a new public health and health discipline on the international first-class level, and cultivate high-level talents who will lead the development of international public health.

JNU President Song Xianzhong said the Fund would support the construction and development of related public health disciplines. He said the institute would bring great synergistic effects and play an important role in promoting the construction of talent teams and scientific and technological research of new public hygiene and health disciplines at JNU. In addition, he said, it will advance the vaccine industry's development and build a high-level medical and health demonstration base in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. 

Du Weimin, chairman of Shenzhen BIOKANGTAI Co., Ltd., and a JNU alumnus, said it was a great honor for him to closely link JNU with his business. He said he hoped the company could effectively integrate its practical advantages in vaccine research, development and industrialization with JNU's profound scientific and research resources and numerous overseas and domestic talents, jointly cultivating compound biomedical talents with international vision and making unremitting efforts to build a biomedical pillar industry in the Greater Bay Area.

During the donation ceremony, the unveiling ceremony of the institute was also held. As JNU's first research institute in public health jointly established by industry and academia, it will support the construction of talent teams and scientific and technological research, promoting the progress of the vaccine industry in the new era.

(The unveiling ceremony of the JNU-BIOKANGTAI Vaccine Industrial Institute)

Song issued a letter of appointment to Prof. Liang Xiaofeng, a famous Chinese preventive medicine expert, as the institute's director. Liang has long been engaged in immunization programs, guiding the implementation of supplementary immunization and disease surveillance. He has served as a member of several national major special expert groups for disease prevention and control. Liang was a key member of research on the effective control and integrated innovation of China's first H1N1 influenza pandemic, which won first prize in the National Science and Technology Progress Awards in 2014.