Shanghai was exciting as ever, and we spent most of the week in the Zhangjiang High Tech Area, in Pudong, which many Chinese call Pharma Valley. There we visited many companies, both divisions of Western companies as well as Chinese CROs, as well as holding a presentation/user meeting, which was very well attended, with over 30 representatives from companies in Zhangjiang. It was also pleasing to see that the uptake of our software by Chinese Universities continues to be very fast, with the number of users in China growing rapidly.

Of course, being Galician my stomach is very close to my heart, so I have to comment on culinary matters. Whilst running around the Zhangjiang area, we had several lunches and dinners which never cease to surprise me. If any of you guys are travelling there in business, you need to check out some of these restaurants. First of all, the food is nothing like the Chinese food I have had in the West. It is a lot more interesting and varied, and in Shanghai there is a lot of local cuisine specific to the area, with a particular mention due to a kind of dumpling called Xiao long bao (well, that is more or less how you pronounce it, if you are looking for it in Chinese menus it would look something like 虾肉小笼包 or 蟹黄小笼包, whether it is crab meat or beef – both are excellent. You can see a couple of photos below). All in all, we had several excellent meals, generously accompanied with TsingDao beer, for normally less than $30-$40 for 3 people, despite been in the commercial hub of the country and one of the main commercial cities in the World!

I also took the opportunity to visit the Expo. I must say that, although a lot of it is spectacular (special mention there to the Chinese Pavilion, which we could not enter, but which is pharaonic it is proportions and very becoming in its design, and to the Saudi Arabia Pavilion, with the World’s largest cinema screen, which visitors traverse on a conveyor belt in what is called screen immersion technology. I have to say this is very cool! Again, there are some photos in the photo gallery if you want to check them out) I don’t think the Expo is for me. A lot of queuing and waiting to see some introductions for a lot of different countries, it is an exhausting day. And, judging by the very weird Spanish Pavilion, you may come away with a very peculiar idea of what some of the countries are about. I guess, however, that if the only chance you have to visit these countries is through their pavilions at the Expo, then this may be an interesting and exciting cultural experience.

Whilst in China, I also decided that we definitely need a version of Mnova in Chinese, and this is now in the works. It will be released soon, I hope, as soon as we get our translations from the NMR people at TLWB, our very hard working Chinese distributors.

So, watch this space, I am hoping that we will very soon be announcing some more deals for our software in China as well as our Mnova Chinese version! And, of course, if you go to Shanghai, in particular to Zhangjiang, don’t go away without checking out the Xiao long bao (specially the crab meat one, delicious!)

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Wednesday and Thursday was spent in Beijing, where we arrived late on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, TLWB had organized another presentation open to all those interested. We had 90 people registered and, in the end, over 75 turned up. Once again Mnova NMR, NMRPredict Desktop and the alpha version of the Mnova MS plugin (more on this very soon in this blog) were all received with enthusiasm by the attendees, representing many of the Universities in the city and some of the biotechs and CROs. As a result of this presentation, a couple of meetings were organized for Thursday.

Wednesday night, we went for dinner to Zhi Li Hui Guan,  a fantastic restaurant in central Beijing, just by the western gate of Tsinghua University. This restaurant is trying to recreate the cooking style of North Eastern China in the XIX century, in the period of the Qing Dynasty. The restaurant is truly spectacular, with a beautiful building, some dishes out of this World (everything was excellent but, for presentation and excellence of preparation, I have to highlight the ‘beef in a box’ (unfortunately I do not know the name of this dish, I just looked at the photos in the menu!). This is brought to the table inside a wooden box, and it is a dish designed for and only enjoyed by, top government officials of the time. The box is beautifully decorated and must be opened in stages, affording to that who opens it longevity (this is represented by a very long  which must be removed before the box can be opened) good fortune, a first layer containing 6 dishes with different sauces, and prosperity, the bottom layer, which holds the most tender beef you can ever hope to taste. A truly amazing dish and a great restaurant. If you are in Beijing, don’t miss it.

Mike, Santi and Hongyu Liu in Beijing

Beijing people are extremely proud of their city, and with good reason, it is as spectacularly beautiful as it is congested. I benefited directly from the pride and generous hospitality of one of them, our driver Mike (this is his Western name), who was taking us back to the hotel to collect our stuff after presenting at the last CRO of the day. Mike was shocked when he heard I had not had time to visit the city or do any sightseeing, and he took it upon himself to take us to Tiannamen Square and around the Forbidden City, where we took some photos, and then running us to the spectacular Terminal 3 of the Beijing Airport, delivering us there 45 minutes before the departure of our flight to Qingdao. Thank you, Mike – he is, by the way, with me and Mr. Liu in the photo to the right.

I found some more interesting facts about China in Beijing. The first, I was amazed by how early children get up and attend school. I went running past a primary school at 6.00 and the kids were exercising in the playground, ready for a long day of education (6.00 until 18.00, I believe). This is of course one of the reasons why Chinese American returnees (many of them are coming back to work in the pharmas, biotechs and CROs of the large Chinese capitals) are finding it very hard to convince their children to come back with them. This is also one of the reasons why China is having no difficulty acting as a conveyor belt in the mass production of highly qualified scientists.

I found the standard of NMR knowledge to be very high at both presentations we gave, with most organic chemists there used to concepts such as apodization of 1D or processing and analysis of 2D correlation such as 2D NOE.

Another interesting fact is the high quality of the labs and facilities, i.e., the research and development infrastructure. Most of these have been created in the last few years, and this means that they all enjoy very modern facilities, normally purpose built by the government and then either sold or rented to these companies. These facilities are normally outside town, but most companies run coaches all over the city, collecting their employees to take them to work and delivering back to the cities at the end of the day.

This is all from a very quick visit to Beijing. Just a few comments on Qingdao, where we spent Friday training the TLWB stuff. I was amazed by Qingdao, which is the city where the sailing competitions were held in the Olympic Games. It has a population of 5 million, very beautiful beaches, excellent accommodation at very reasonable prices (how about a huge kingsize bedroom for €60 per night with breakfast and internet included in the Haiqing Hotel, the hotel used by many of the Olympic delegations during the Games? BTW, every single hotel in China appears to have free internet access, this is something that hoteliers in the West should really learn from). Qingdao is also famous for its breweries, probably as a consequence of having been a German colony in the XIX and early XX century, and has a beautiful German quarter, with alpine and Bavarian style villas in leafy streets surrounding some excellent beaches. I think this would be a fantastic place to spend a beach holiday, and a very economic alternative to the European resorts (Cote d’Azur, Costa Brava, Riviera, etc.) If you made it there, do not miss Yangguang Jiari a fantastic fish restaurant where you pick your food prior to cooking from tanks and ice buckets (see Qingdao photo gallery). 

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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 3 comments Leave a comment