Healthcare

BGI founder’s vaccine comment spooks outcry
Jan 12, 2018 (WiC 393)

Prevention, detection, treatment. Over the centuries that has become the gold standard for controlling disease. But last month Wang Jian, the head of the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), ruffled feathers when he appeared to have suggested a ...

BGI Genomics in investor focus after huge run-up in share price
Nov 24, 2017 (WiC 389)

“If you are really stupid, I’d call that a disease.” So said the biologist James Watson, during a British television series in 2003. Watson was one of the Cambridge University team of scientists that won the Nobel Prize after they famously ...

China declares war on cancer
Nov 3, 2017 (WiC 386)

In Mao’s China it was a familiar sight for workers to begin their day with communal exercises. During the Cultural Revolution, students shouted slogans such as “Great leader Chairman Mao teaches us: develop sports! Enhance people’s health! ...

China counts on ‘sharing economy’ to aid healthcare reform
Sep 29, 2017 (WiC 382)

‘Medical malls’ were dreamed up in the United States in the 1980s to bring healthcare services closer to residential areas. The concept largely idled over the following decades until struggling property firms began looking for tenants for ...

Moutai builds a hospital and a university in Guizhou
Sep 1, 2017 (WiC 378)

Not many people have noticed but President Xi Jinping was elected as one of Guizhou’s delegates to the National People’s Congress in April. Having previously represented Shanghai in the lawmaking body, Xi’s switch was “huge ...

Alzheimer’s could soon become China’s biggest health problem
May 26, 2017 (WiC 367)

This publication has not touched on the subject of Alzheimer’s before, probably because the disease has largely been ignored in China. In this essay Peter Fuhrman and Dr Wang Yansong – respectively the chief executive officer ...

As BGI pushes for Shenzhen IPO, a former boss chases unicorn status
Apr 7, 2017 (WiC 361)

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” If the question comes from Wang Jun, the former CEO of genome sequencing firm Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), then the right answer would almost certainly be his new company, ...

Chinese drugs firms prepare for IPOs
Jul 29, 2016 (WiC 335)

Watsons dates its founding back to 1841 with the opening of the Hong Kong Dispensary. Now a unit of Li Ka-shing’s CK Hutchison Holdings, it celebrated its 175th anniversary at the turn of the year. But the inconvenient truth is that Watsons is ...

Top biotech firm ditches New York for Shenzhen
Jul 15, 2016 (WiC 333)

In 1979, the author Douglas Adams penned a novel in which a super computer called Deep Thought took 7.5 million years to answer the “ultimate question of life, the universe and everything” (the answer was 42). Adams may not have imagined that ...

Why investors are pouring cash into new private practices set up by doctors
Jul 1, 2016 (WiC 331)

Antagonism towards the medical profession in China seems to be getting more common. The Chinese Medical Doctor Association has estimated that more than 70% of its members have suffered verbal abuse or physical violence and in 2014, 347 people ...

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