Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday inspected two institutes in Beijing to learn about the progress on technologies to fight against the COVID-19 epidemic.
What research and development achievements has he inspected? Here’s a review.
Researchers test medicines at a contingency medicine research lab for major epidemic outbreaks at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences on Monday. (Photos: CCTV)
On Monday afternoon, Xi went to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences first. Since the outbreak of the epidemic, the academy has been concentrating on emergency scientific research and has achieved phased results.
In the building where medical instruments were tested, Xi inspected a contingency medicine research lab for major epidemic outbreaks. He called for joint efforts in the hard battle against the epidemic to master more core technologies with independent intellectual property.
While inspecting, Xi urged prompt efforts to develop safe and effective vaccines, drugs and testing kits to help fight the virus.
After that, he went to the School of Medicine at Tsinghua University, where he visited the Global Health and Infectious Diseases Center and the Biomedical Detection Technology and Instrument Beijing Laboratory, and watched an ongoing enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay.
On February 22, a team led by Cheng Jing, a professor at Tsinghua University School of Medicine, developed a new kind of nucleic acid detection kit. It can detect six kinds of respiratory viruses including the novel coronavirus within 90 minutes, using only collected samples of secretion, such as oropharyngeal swabs.
Cheng Jing and his research team.
Zhang Linqi, another professor from the school, also reported to Xi the research progress of his team. He started to set up a team in early January to develop vaccines against the coronavirus.
A few days ago, Zhang’s team uncovered the structure of the cellular complexes formed the moment when the novel coronavirus invaded the human cells. “As long as we know how the virus opens the ‘gate’ of the human body, we can figure out how to protect the ‘gate’ from invasion," said Zhang.
An integrated rapid COVID-19 nucleic acid detection kit.
(Compiled by Cao Mengqi)