Professor Tan and the company's team were featured on the front page of “Liberation Daily” on August 8, 2016

Full text of the reproduction.

Research institute and enterprise merge to take the "amphibious" advantage

On the 5th to 6th floors of the first building of "Zhangjiang Pharmaceutical Valley" on Cailun Road in Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park, there are "one set of people and two identities" - both the Zhangjiang Institute of Modern Biotechnology of East China University of Science and Technology and Shanghai BioEngine Sci-Tech Co., Ltd.

This golden egg incubated in the national science and technology business incubator "Zhangjiang Pharmaceutical Valley" has recently completed the first phase of construction, with an investment of 70 million yuan. The investors and financiers are not only interested in the innovative R&D and application services of the key technologies for efficient industrial production of antibodies and vaccines, but also in the creative play of the "Science and Technology Innovation Article 22", such as the mechanism of employing and attracting talents: not only is the team of professors absolutely For example, in the mechanism of employing and attracting talents, not only is the professor team controlling the company but also scientific research and management talents including executives can enter the university system and enterprise system respectively according to their needs so that each can take their position and develop their strengths.

The big head and small head of equity "swap and invert"

From vaccine and antibody R&D to industrial production, large-scale, high-density animal cell culture technology has become the mainstream technology in the development of today's international biopharmaceutical industry. The global market size of human viral vaccines has reached tens of billions of dollars and has doubled in the past five years; while the proportion of China's vaccine sales revenue to the total income of the pharmaceutical industry is currently less than 1%. At the same time, the global therapeutic antibody drug industry surged from more than $300 million 20 years ago to nearly $100 billion last year, yet the annual sales of domestic antibody drugs in China are still less than 1 billion RMB. This shows that China, with a population of nearly 1.4 billion people, has tremendous room for growth in the vaccine and antibody industry.

In Shanghai, the R&D center of the biopharmaceutical industry, a team of students and faculty members led by Professor Tan Wensong, the academic leader of the State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering of East China University of Science and Technology, is the first and only team specializing in the large-scale and high-density culture of animal cells in China.

According to last year's "Science and Technology Innovation Article 22" in Shanghai, universities and research institutes can transfer less than 70% of the income from scientific and technological achievements to the R&D team. The new Huali Zhangjiang Institute of Modern Biotechnology seems to be the first to take advantage of this trend, as it has been operating in a corporate and market-oriented way since the beginning of its establishment, adopting a complete shareholding system and designing such a basic structure well before the introduction of the "Science and Innovation Article 22".

It turns out that the research institute "and" the company registered in the Shanghai Biological and Pharmaceutical Innovation Incubator Park, the registered capital of only 1 million yuan. Tan Wensong and his team "paid" 700,000 yuan to acquire 70% of the equity. The university, on the other hand, takes up only 30% of the shares with intangible assets, breaking the convention that universities often take the "big share" in science and technology transformation enterprises. The share ratio of both sides can be said to be "inverted", but it has renewed the vitality and confidence of scientific research on the industrial road.

With the advantages of "people" and "technology", after the first financing at the end of last year, the institute successfully obtained an investment of 15 million yuan from Shanghai Venture Capital, equivalent to 12% of the equity, with the university and the professor team each giving up a certain percentage of equity. The professor team still accounts for 61.6% of the equity and the university accounts for 26.4%, each distributing the benefits of the enterprise according to the share ratio. In addition, BioEngine also received RMB 20 million in special development funds from Zhangjiang National Innovation Demonstration Zone for the construction of a service platform for the application of antibody and vaccine biomanufacturing technology, as well as a pilot plant (Phase I) for the localization of raw materials and equipment.

Dual-track system to make talent willing to come more willing to stay

People are still the core of science and technology innovation. Tan Wensong's team has three professors, two associate professors, four research assistants or lecturers, and more than 50 master's and doctoral students. If this team enters into a corporate research institute as it is, and becomes its main body of it, then this old template of "professorial enterprise" may not adapt to the development of the science and technology industry under the new market economy. From the perspective of university teaching and research, it is not appropriate to employ people in this way.

As a leading figure, Tan Wensong is also the president of Huali Zhangjiang Modern Biotechnology Research Institute and the chairman of Shanghai BioEngine Sci-Tech Co., Ltd. With decades of experience in teaching in universities and cooperating with enterprises, Tan has a deep understanding of the different systems of schools and enterprises. "Different people are suitable to develop under different systems." Tan believes that in the introduction of talents, many returnee researchers may not be willing to enter the university system, or even if they come, it is easy to leave, so it is better to give talents two "options" and run according to the dual-track system.

So, this "research institute + enterprise" external Lu Yi as general manager, responsible for project operation and management and investment and financing operations, this professor-level senior engineer engaged in biomedical industry management and consulting for more than 30 years; at the same time, the deputy general manager Shi Keyu was 3M China Ltd. medical device new product manager, production supervisor, as a senior Ltd. as a senior engineer responsible for the implementation of localization of raw materials; another deputy general manager, Zhao Liang, is a postdoctoral fellow from the University of Minnesota, responsible for key issues such as R&D organization, science, and technology development planning and team building. As the senior management of the company, the salary level is fully in line with the market.

As a Ph.D. supervisor, Tan Wenzong also asks the biochemistry Ph.D., whom he taught, to enter the management team as R&D director, responsible for R&D and service of critical technologies for antibody and vaccine production, and as a shortage of engineering talents for on-site implementation and technical guidance.

Of course, the two systems do not exclude "dual identities", and four of the nine faculty members, including Wenzong Tan, have "dual roles". As a professor at Huali, Tan is still in charge of teaching and research in this field, and supervising master and doctoral students, and his postgraduate students also include R&D and production supervisors from companies such as Haisheng Pharmaceuticals. The latter is technically competent in "amphibian". This also brings out the "amphibious" advantage of the combination of the institute and the company.

Antibody vaccine upgrade "new industrial version"

The first building of Pharmaceutical Valley, Tan Wensong their new industry-academia-research institutions are building tens of millions of dollars of equipment, establishing and improving technological innovation R & D and application services platform, and cooperation with several downstream enterprises in the form of enterprises, the development of antibodies and vaccines industrial production of new technologies, new processes and a variety of culture media "new recipes", such as has been for a domestic For example, we have built the first antibody fusion protein drug production line with a cell density of 10 million and a reactor scale of 1,000 upgrades for a leading biopharmaceutical company in China. A series of new technologies and processes for the production of viral vaccines based on high-density suspension culture technology of animal cells have been fruitful and have begun to gradually upgrade the "industrial version" that changes the rules of the industry.

People who are not in the industry may not know that the status quo of production technology in the domestic virus vaccine industry is still quite backward: the common production process of human and poultry virus vaccines either uses chicken embryos in eggs or primary cells such as gopher kidneys, and the latter can often only be cultured in rolled bottles, in addition to adding bovine serum as a nutrient solution; while the proportion of modern animal cell mass culture technology using bioreactors is less than 5%. In traditional vaccine plants, tens of millions of fresh eggs are wasted, and these "toxic" eggs have to be incinerated to avoid contamination. The new process of industrial production of avian influenza vaccine based on serum-free single-cell suspension culture, pioneered by Prof. Tan's team, has been successfully applied in domestic animal vaccine manufacturers to achieve efficient industrial production of influenza virus vaccine.

At present, key raw materials such as serum-free protein-free culture medium and microcarriers, as well as key equipment such as bioreactors, which support the development of China's antibody and vaccine industries, are still highly dependent on imports, and this is the biggest bottleneck that Tan Wensong's team has overcome. They developed a large-scale suspension culture technology for animal cells with independent intellectual property rights, which does not require eggs or serum, and can also be individually designed and developed to configure different culture media according to different animal cells and target products. With the support of the Zhangjiang Special Project, Bechtel Biotechnology has made a breakthrough in culture medium manufacturing technology. The pilot production system of personalized serum-free culture medium at the international advanced level has been completed and put into operation, with an annual production capacity of more than one million liters, and the quality index is the same as and better than imported serum-free culture medium.

It is reported that the future investment in the second phase will be more than 150 million yuan, while the parent company will be differentiated into several subsidiaries according to different segmented product lines. Tan Wensong said that the current net profit is first invested in research and development and reproduction, it is expected that the input and output can be leveled within this year, next year is expected to be the revenue of 50 million yuan, and the year after is expected to break 100 million.