Dowson Tong, senior executive vice-president of Tencent and president of Tencent's cloud and smart industry group, shares his views on technology and medicine during the 2020 Tencent Medical Enlightenment Summit. (Photo: agencies)

Top medical experts and scientists from around the world shared with the public the latest cutting-edge research results in medical field such as the coronavirus, infectious diseases, cancer, depression, and reproductive medicine during the 2020 Tencent Medical Enlightenment Summit.

Dowson Tong, senior executive vice-president of Tencent and president of Tencent's cloud and smart industry group, said: "We believe that technology should be used for good and combined with medicine to help eliminate human's greatest pain points. We aim to use science and technology in tandem to help everyone better evaluate, manage and improve their health."

One of the biggest success points of this epidemic prevention, or a pain point of this epidemic prevention, is thanks in large part to the world's strong investment in various domains of medical science as well as community's joint prevention and control strategy that people managed to quickly contain the outbreak, said Zhong Nanshan, professor at Guangzhou Medical University and director of the National Center for Clinical Medicine for Respiratory Diseases.

He praised the value of science and technology in the epidemic situation. "AI, big data, 5G and Internet have given us great help in epidemic prediction, vaccine development and disease diagnosis. Cutting-edge technology is a transformative force to promote the development of medicine in the future," he noted.

Eric Rubin, an infectious disease expert and editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, a leading global medical journal, said although there are promising advancements in utilizing DNA and adenovirus to develop a vaccine, further clinical trials are required to better assess if they are effective and safe for human consumption.

"Developing a vaccine usually takes more than a decade, so the fact that we were able to condense what usually takes years into months is a major victory," he said.

Huang Lei, vice-president of Tencent Medical, believed that internet of medical science popularization has now ushered in the 3.0 era, which means reshaping the connection of science popularization by means of social and scenario communication, and reconstructing the person, content and scene of science popularization, so that the production, dissemination and form of knowledge are more open and diversified.

In addition, Tencent Medipedia announced three programs at the summit, including medical science popularization officers program, public science popularization officers program and open content program, aiming to enhance science popularization and promote the dissemination of high-quality medical science content to the public.