Zhang Yang

nicolezyyy@163.com

A DIABETES research team led by Professor Andrew Morris, vice chancellor of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, has joined hands with Shenzhen People’s Hospital to establish an international diabetes center in Shenzhen.

As part of Shenzhen’s “3R Project,” which encourages the introduction of established doctors, hospitals and institutes from outside the city to help improve local health-care services, the cooperation between Prof. Morris’ research team and the hospital will bring globally advanced prevention and treatment to local diabetes patients.

“What we want to do in China and the United Kingdom is to join together science with clinical trials to support world-class patient care and to use informatics or data science as a platform,” said Prof. Morris, when he gave a speech at the hospital Thursday.

By setting up a clinical information system to evaluate risk factors of diabetes incidence, Prof. Morris’ team has managed to reduce the amputation rate and blindness rate of diabetes patients in Scotland by nearly 40 percent over the past two decades and has helped 250,000 diabetes patients in Scotland effectively control their symptoms.

Jia Lijing, director of the hospital’s endocrinology department, said the morbidity of diabetes in Shenzhen is higher than the national average. “But many residents are still not aware of the high disability and fatality rates of diabetes,” she said.

According to Jia, the hospital hopes to set up a management system to closely follow up on its diabetes patients and provide them with further treatment. She said Prof. Morris’ team has rolled out clinical research for stem cell therapy to treat diabetes, which has been used in nearly 100 clinical cases. “We also hope to introduce the therapy through our cooperation,” she added.

Some of the research team’s core members will be stationed at the hospital on a long-term basis, and Prof. Morris and other academics of the team will come to provide research guidance and trainings regularly, according to an agreement signed Friday.

Diabetes has become one of the top three chronic noninfectious diseases most threatening to the public’s health across the globe. Statistics from the International Diabetes Federation showed that there were over 100 million diabetes patients in China as of 2015. The morbidity of diabetes in China is around 9.7 percent, and Shenzhen has an estimated 1 million diabetes patients.