政府新闻
上海生物医药产业横跨长三角地区 2025-12-22
Shanghai’s biomedical industry, which has rapidly grown thanks to the city’s research and development strengths, is now expanding into the Yangtze River Delta region to leverage its lower labor costs and abundant spatial resources.
Despite Shanghai being the cradle of the biomedical industry, enterprises need to seek opportunities for pilot-scale testing, industrial production, and technology transfer in surrounding areas to fully leverage lower labor costs and more ample spatial resources of neighboring cities and regions, Liu Yun, founding partner and chairman of Huayi Capital, told Yicai.
The Yangtze River Delta region, which encompasses Shanghai and the provinces of Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, is one of China’s key manufacturing hubs and most economically innovative regions. Its biomedical industry accounts for 40 percent of the country’s total.
When companies become leaders in their respective fields, they often go back to Shanghai to set up R&D or global centers there, forming a “return path,” Liu noted. “Both Shanghai and surrounding areas in the Yangtze River Delta area benefit from this, allowing them to share the incremental dividends brought by enterprise growth.”
For example, Shanghai-based Yijian Health recently launched an in vitro diagnostic test production line in Jiaxing in Zhejiang, and Beijing Origingene-Tech Biotechnology, which has its R&D headquarters in Shanghai, built a pet testing equipment plant in the same city, Liu said. Both companies are backed by Huayi Capital.
“Such cases are very common in the Yangtze River Delta region, forming a standard path for the collaborative development of biomedical scientific innovation,” according to Liu.
To financially support the expansion of biomedical companies in the Yangtze River Delta area, the Yangtze River Delta G60 Science and Innovation Corridor launched the Biomedical Fund to integrate resources from Shanghai and surrounding cities.
The G60 Science and Innovation Corridor encompasses nine cities along the G60 expressway and other major high-speed railways in the Yangtze River Delta region -- Hangzhou, Huzhou, Jiaxing, and Jinhua in Zhejiang province, Hefei, Wuhu, and Xuancheng in Anhui province, Songjiang district in Shanghai, and Suzhou in Jiangsu province. They are home to 9,813 biomedical enterprises, accounting for nearly 15 percent of China’s total.
Cooperation between Shanghai and the rest of the Yangtze River Delta region in the biopharmaceutical field should focus on the allocation and flow of technical resources, which requires a complete scientific and technological achievement evaluation system, Yan Mingfeng, president of the Shanghai Technology Exchange, told Yicai.
The evaluation system should address issues, such as who made the achievements, what type of achievements were accomplished, and how to better value the achievement application process, Yan noted, adding that the STEX set up a special biomedical board precisely to solve these problems.
The STEX’s special biomedical board has processed 1,835 entries involving 4,649 achievement services, with a cumulative transaction value of over CNY38 billion (USD5.2 billion), Yicai learned.
“Building on Shanghai’s existing sci-tech innovation and financial advantages, standards for evaluating biomedical technology assets, pipeline pledge, and other mechanisms have been put into practice,” said Yan.
“These, coupled with the ongoing exploration of models, such as intellectual property securitization and investment-loan linkage, will continue to be spread from Shanghai to the Yangtze River Delta region, promoting the construction of integrated sci-tech and industrial innovation across the entire region,” he pointed out.
Songjiang is the bridge connecting Shanghai to surrounding cities in the Yangtze River Delta region, Song Suwei, head of the Sci-Tech Innovation Group of the Joint Conference Office of the G60 Science and Innovation Corridor, told Yicai.
Biotech firms often set up R&D bases in Songjiang and complete manufacturing in the other eight cities of the G60 Science and Innovation Corridor, which is an effective model for the layout of the biomedical industry, Song noted.
Source: Yicai Global
