Xia Yuanjie

szrbgracexia@126.com

BUYERS were wowed by various products on display at the Southern University of Science and Technology’s (SUSTech) booth, which ranged from a 3.4-meter wingspan drone to μm-scale micro-LED chips during the China Hi-Tech Fair (CHTF) at the Shenzhen World Exhibition & Convention Center in Bao’an District yesterday.

The country’s top-notch research university organized more than 10 university-run enterprises and R&D institutions to present and promote their latest achievements of cutting-edge scientific research projects in biomedicine, new materials, nanomaterials, micro-LED display and aerospace, among others.

All of the exhibits are cultivated by SUSTech’s industry-university-research ecosystem, a mechanism aiming to facilitate commercialization of scientific and research findings by providing services, such as financial support and patents application consultation, to a research team from its initial basic research to technological breakthroughs to production of commercial value, as written in a SUSTech exhibition brochure.

A desktop-size machine linking arrays of reagent tubes and test petri dishes on display is the second-generation automatic cell immunofluorescence staining equipment developed by Wu Lab, one of SUSTech’s scientific research team.

“This technique can solve traditional manual operation problems, like poor repeatability and reliability. Our product will be the first of its kind in the market,” Dr. Liu Zhihe, a core member of Wu Lab, told Shenzhen Daily.

“The apparatus allows cell samples’ automatic immunostaining process for pathological studies, like tumor imaging, with greatly improved efficiency and accuracy, which has huge commercialization potential,” Liu said. Under the school’s support, the research team will register a biotech company named Judian, to further upgrade and transform their technological achievements.

SUSTech Drone Laboratory’s unmanned aerial vehicle was also highlighted at the fair.

Liang Zikun, a representative of the lab, said that they brought the ETS20 drone, which was developed according to industrial and market needs under the guidance of SUSTech’s ecosystem. “We are here looking for business partners enabling its application in aerial organ transportation,” Liang said.

Several of the exhibits featured flagship products from mature SUSTech-run firms, including Nanke Materials’ medical goggles anti-fog wipes that were donated to the Third People’s Hospital of Shenzhen amid the COVID-19 outbreak last year, and Shenzhen Sitan Technology’s Micro-LED serial products that won three rounds of investment in the company.

Statistics showed that between 2015 and the end of August this year, SUSTech had commercialized 279 scientific and technological projects.