So, here I am, sitting at my Beijing hotel, late in the evening, ready to fly out to Brazil tomorrow. This visit to China has been a whirlwind, and I have not had time to update the blog, as the opportunity to do so had to compete with, and finally lose to, the chance to get some much needed sleep. The trip has been great, and I have found out a lot of new stuff. I will try to update a couple of times in the next couple of days, with short articles on the time spent at each of the cities I visited.
From right to left, Chen, Hongyu Liu, of TLWB, and Santi ready for business in Shanghai. Click on the photo to view the Shanghai library
Shanghai continued to impress me as a truly bustling Asian metropolis, a city of business and commerce. There I met Mr. Hongyu Liu, the General Manager of TLWB (see previous post), who is a very hard working and organized individual with the hunger for success and commitment to achieving it that one can expect from entrepreneurs in recently prosperous economies. Hongyu also happens to be a thoroughly nice and likeable guy, a great host and a very democratic manager to his team of young and smart employees. I expect great things from these guys.
The week started very well, with a visit to the restored Shikumen district of Xin Tian Di (New Heaven), in the heart of Shanghai, the ‘in’ place for eating, drinking and partying in Shanghai, with a mixture of Western and Oriental style establishments, although perhaps with too much of a bias towards the Western. It is also the location of Paul’s, a very stylish French boulangerie and teahouse with excellent coffee and cakes. After a very nice evening there on the first day, we then worked through the Sunday and finished with dinner at Herbal Legend, in Zhangjiang Hi Tech Area, very close to the excellent Parkyard Hotel (Bibo Lu). If you are visiting Shanghai in business, I strongly recommend both. As far as industrial area eateries go, ‘Herbal Legend’ is exceptional, with very good service, life Chinese music most nights and a huge menu of very high quality prepared by Chinese herbal medicine experts, so this is not only good eating, but also good for your health!. On the Monday we visited some companies in the Hi Tech Area, where our software was received with excitement and, on Tuesday, we held a presentation at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, organized by TLWB and attended by more than 40 scientists from different companies and educational and government institutions. The presentation was a great success and gave us very good traction in the Shanghai area, as well as providing an opportunity for me to try out my incipient Chinese. You will be able to see some photos of the presentation and of some of the attendees by clicking on the photo above or on this link.
After this, it was time to make for the airport ready to fly to Beijing, the next stage of the trip. More on that a little later. But first,a couple other interesting facts about China and particularly the Chemistry and NMR community there and, like many things in China, it is all about numbers.
It turns out that there are more than 1,000 organizations (public and private) doing NMR within China which, for such a technology and capital intensive technique, is a very impressive number and shows how far these guys have come so quickly.
The second is about the Chinese government approach to CRO, pharma and biotech. We visited AQ Biopharma , a biopharmaceutical start up which is sharing a building with a further 60 start ups. All the facilities are owned by the central government, and rented out to these companies in very advantageous conditions. Each of them gets a lab (different sizes available) and an office. On the ground floor of this 6 storey building (and, by the way, there are several of these buildings in one road, at least 4-5 housing around 60 start ups each) there is a 400 MHz NMR spectrometer and some LC/GC/MS equipment, together with NMR and LC/GC/MS experts, available to all users in that building. I have seen similar set ups in the West (for example, the Nexus facility at Santiago de Compostela University) but the amazing thing here once again is the numbers involved. If there are about 300 of these start ups in one road in one city, what are the chances of some of these succeeding?
All this is fuelled by a ready supply of chemists and biochemists, which are being churned out by Chinese Universities at a rate of knots, as these are still very popular subjects for University hopefuls, unlike in the West, where the scarcity of Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics graduates is posing a problem. And these scientists are very keen on improving their language skills, one of their self-acknowledged challenges. The Pudong Language School is a building of pharaonic proportions which was already open at 6.30 am, when I ran past it. This is not going to stop us from releasing Mnova in Chinese, though. Mnova is already available in Japanese, Russian and Spanish, as well as English, and it is prepared so that it is very easy to ‘localize’ to other languages. If any of you have any other suggestions on possible languages Mnova should support, please use the comments to let us know.
OK, next post, Beijing.
Santi Trips and business development, Uncategorized Mestrelab, mestrelab china, mnova china, shanghai
ENC at Asilomar is coming round again. Exciting! We are already looking forward to those late nights at Suraj’s and to our early morning runs deteriorating into early morning crawls!