Good morning. Welcome come to this week’s IP Cafe. Here’s Fino. Now let’s take a cup of coffee and enjoy the following five minutes with me.
Let’s quick browse the headlines:
· Top Court Issues Guideline to Protect Yellow River Basin
· Medical Equipment Makers Step Up Innovation
· InterDigital Eyes Greater Tech Cooperation with Chinese Firms
· Phase I Clinical Trial for Antibody COVID-19 Treatment Underway
China's top court called for courts along the Yellow River to provide stronger legal protection for the basin's environment and ecology, with harsher punishments to polluters.
The Supreme People's Court issued a guideline on improving legal services and protection for the river basin's environment and development, in which, it demanded courts along the river to fight pollution-related crimes and solve disputes related to industrial upgrading or transformation by efficient and effective case hearings.
While increasing the criminal punishments to deter polluters, the guideline with 18 articles also ordered courts along the river to pay higher attention to hearing disputes on local livelihood, finance, intellectual property rights and enterprise bankruptcy, Tao said, adding the aim is to build a sound business environment for the basin and promote the regional high-quality development.
Meanwhile, courts in seven provinces and two autonomous regions along the river will also provide more legal support to government agencies that play their role in preventing the environment from being polluted and take measures to increase supervision.
Considering rich cultures along the river basin, those destroying cultural relics or historical sites will be harshly punished, according to the guideline.
China's medical manufacturing industry managed to maintain its momentum amid the COVID-19 pandemic, while boosting nation's efforts of bettering its manufacturing sector and its role in the global medical supply chain, industry experts said.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology approved in early May the establishment of a national high-performance medical apparatus and instruments innovation center in Shenzhen, in South China's Guangdong province, marking the country's first State-level innovation center in the medical device sector.
Aiming to create a global open platform for innovation, entrepreneurship, and industrial integration, the establishment of the Shenzhen center is part of the country's strategy to drive the upgrade of its manufacturing industry.
Currently, there are a total of 16 national manufacturing innovation centers in China. The newly established one in Shenzhen was among those centers.
"The innovation center will adopt a dynamic mechanism in market-oriented operation, innovation collaboration, intellectual property operation and a talent team. It is expected to fill the gap between academia and industry through technological innovation and engineering," said Zheng Hairong, director of the innovation center and deputy head of the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The innovation center has gathered a batch of leading medical equipment manufacturers, including Mindray, United Imaging, and LifeTech Scientific Corp. There are also research institutes in the center such as the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
InterDigital, the United States-based mobile and video technology provider, remains confident about China's 5G market and about greater technological cooperation between the two countries amid the global scramble to develop and deploy the superfast telecom technology, a top company official said.
William J Merritt, president and chief executive officer of the company, said: "More Chinese companies are taking part in the global 5G standard-setting process and playing a very important role. We are all committed to the advancement of 5G and beyond 5G technology through technological research and development."
On the company's relations with China, Merritt said it was more of a blend of competition and cooperation. "We compete to come up with the best solutions. But we also realize that we're working together, as a group, to advance technology across the entire ecosystem," he said.
In April, the company signed a multiyear, worldwide, nonexclusive patent license agreement with Chinese telecoms equipment manufacturer Huawei Technologies Co Ltd. The agreement covers certain Huawei products and certain InterDigital essential patents.
The agreement was reached amid challenging circumstances given the current economic downturn brought by the COVID-19 epidemic. The economic environment created by the global pandemic has helped make the economic gaps in the negotiations smaller and easier to navigate, said Merritt.
The company said that Chinese enterprises are playing an increasingly important role in the global communications industry, including 5G. More than half the smartphones shipped around the world are from Chinese companies－the effect is obvious.
The company is willing to work with other Chinese manufacturers in setting technology standards, including 5G standards, as the unification of standards translates innovation into revenue, it said.
Chinese scientists have launched a phase I clinical trial for the world's first neutralizing antibody treatment against COVID-19, which has showed great promise in arresting the growth of novel coronavirus in animal testing, but efficacy in humans remains to be seen.
The National Medical Products Administration approved the trial on last Friday, according to an online statement by the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the drug's creator.
Details on the trial have not been posted on the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, a platform documenting applications and ongoing clinical trials in China.
In late May Chinese scientists from the institute published a study in the journal, Nature, detailing how a neutralizing monoclonal antibody, which was collected from recovered COVID-19 patients, could greatly decrease the viral load in the respiratory tract of infected rhesus monkeys.
The antibody, CB6, works by interfering with the binding process between novel coronavirus and the ACE2 receptor, thus blocking the virus from infecting cells, the journal said.
The institute said that it had begun relevant work in mid-January, and identified dozens of genes for creating the antibody from recovered patients. By late February, researchers had discovered two antibodies, CA1 and CB6, that have very potent viral neutralizing capability in vitro.
"It is an antibody drug with great clinical application prospects independently researched and developed by CAS," the institute said, adding it has filed a patent application and the drug could enter production quickly if its safety and potency in humans are established.
Those for this week’s news. For more IP events in China, please visit www.chinaiptoday.com. See you next Saturday and enjoy the nice weekend.
