High-tech area draws bioindustry companies, experts

Guangzhou Development District has attracted professionals and enterprises in the biological industries with its favorable policies, quickly becoming a core growth driver for Guangzhou's international science and technological innovation.

China has made biological industries part of its national development strategy and aims to grow the industry to reach more than 8 trillion yuan ($1.18 trillion) in scale by 2020.

In 2016, total R&D investment made in the district was equivalent to 5.38 percent of the district's gross domestic product, equivalent to the level of international innovative countries.

Focusing on leading bioindustry personnel, the local government launched specialized funds to subsidize their research projects and accommodation, which has attracted professionals from home and abroad.

"This place has gathered more high-tech professionals, and the services and policies provided by the local government are considerate and very suitable for our research," said Zhou Zhiming, former chief scientist of a company in the US. He worked for the company specialized in water-based polymeric materials in around 2005. In 2010, he relocated his company to the Guangzhou Development District.

Zhou is representative of Chinese experts working in foreign countries that show interest in the district.

Yin Lianghong is another such expert who returned from Germany in 2011 to start her hemodialysis instrument development project in China. After seeing the most central place in Guangzhou and even in Guangdong province to gather high-end professionals, she said: "The very first impression when I came back was that better-and-better policies have been implemented in the interests of technological innovation."

By the end of 2016, more than 3,000 Chinese people who had studied abroad chose to start their careers in Guangzhou Development District. Among them, there are top scientists and veteran investors, and even Nobel Prize winners. The district's professionals in the biomedicine field also include 38 people listed on the national Thousand Talents Program, and 12 provincial-level innovative and startup teams.

Guangzhou Development District has constructed one of South China's strongest biomedicine incubators, supporting listed companies such as Da An Gene, Guanhao Biotech and Improve Medical. More than 300 enterprises have settled down in the incubators.

While attracting global high-end professionals, the district has actively encouraged local biomedicine enterprises to connect with global resources, and encouraged them to expand internationally.

(China Daily 07/04/2017 page15)