Zhang Yang

nicolezyyy@163.com

THE Shenzhen International Biotech Summit 2017 and the Biology and Health Industry Expo was held at the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center on Thursday. Nearly 90 guests consisting of biotech entrepreneurs, academicians and investors from home and abroad attended the summit.

Barry J. Marshall, co-winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, delivered a speech after the summit’s opening ceremony Thursday morning. Marshall won the Nobel Prize for discovering that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is the cause of most peptic ulcers.

“The H. pylori exists very commonly in China. Half of the population has it,” said Marshall. According to him, the H. pylori infection rates in some cities in Southwest China are higher than 70 percent and it leads to 350,000 cases of stomach cancer in China per year, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the world’s stomach cancer cases.

“One of our duties is to gradually reduce the H. pylori infection rate in China ... We want to decrease the stomach cancer rate in China by 50 percent,” he said, adding that the eradication of H. pylori in China may take 40 years and will require concentrated efforts on developing new diagnostic technologies.

According to him, future diagnostic technologies for H. pylori need a proven gold standard. “In any study of diagnosis, the method being evaluated has to be compared to something. The best available test that is used as comparison is called the gold standard,” he said.

But he said the gold standard is not always gold because there might be a new test better and more accurate than the gold standard.

Regarding the diagnosis of the presence of H. pylori, invasive tests such as obtaining culture samples, histology and urea tests and noninvasive tests such as urea breath tests, serology and feces antigen are able to show if the patient is “gold positive” for H. pylori, according to Marshall.

Marshall set up a research institute in the Life Science Industrial Park in Dapeng New Area last year. His institute has worked closely with local hospitals in Shenzhen and researched the diagnosis and treatment of gastrointestinal tract diseases.

Marshall said that his team in Shenzhen has been reformatting the tests into flow cells, membranes and small and quick PCR, and also interfacing with new and emerging technologies, such as attaching devices to smartphones and longitudinal health monitoring apps.

According to Ai Xuefeng, vice mayor of Shenzhen, the output value of the city’s biology and health industry reached 200 billion yuan (US$30.33 billion) last year, with a year-on-year growth of 15 percent. The China National GeneBank, the largest gene bank of its kind in the world, was set up in Shenzhen last year and it has contributed 40 percent of global gene-sequencing data.