Zhangjiang Science City, which is located in Pudong New Area in Shanghai, has been promoting the development of its innovation chain and industry chain to become a hub for scientific and technological innovation.

Among many science and technology parks in China, only Zhangjiang has been named Science City. Even many roads in Zhangjiang Science City are named after Chinese and foreign scientists such as Zhang Heng, Zu Chongzhi and Isaac Newton. 

In 2018, Zhangjiang Science City was encouraged to elevate scientific and technical innovation, allowing it play a significant role in putting the innovation-driven development plan into practice, and speed up the switch from traditional to alternative forms of kinetic energy.

In terms of institutional innovations related to science and technology, Zhangjiang Science City has been exploring. The bonded monitoring of the integrated circuit industrial chain and the drug listing permit holder method were both pioneered by the place.

As the "trump card" of Shanghai in science and technology innovation, Zhangjiang brings together more than 22,000 enterprises and 499,000 practitioners. One out of every three Class I new drugs listed in China comes from Zhangjiang and seven of the world’s top 10 chip designers have set up regional headquarters and R&D centers in Zhangjiang.

A solid foundation for innovation

Basic functional platforms based on high-level opening and sharing have laid a solid foundation for innovation in Zhangjiang Science City.

The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, also known as Shanghai Light Source, is situated on Zhang Heng Road in Zhangjiang. The second amplifier line of the soft X-ray free-electron laser system was recently being debugged there by Liu Bo, deputy director of the Light Source Science Center, and numerous other researchers. They insisted on staying in the lab despite Shanghai's epidemic resurgence in order to continue their work so that more scientific researchers might use the equipment to submit their data as soon as possible.

Over the years, more than 30,000 researchers from 571 facilities across the country have used the Shanghai Light Source to explore the microscopic world of matter. Every year, Shanghai Light Source has been referenced in more than a dozen papers that were published in the world's top three major scientific journals.

"When Shanghai Light Source started construction, there were more than 10 third-generation synchrotron radiation light sources in the world, and we learned from the experiences of foreign projects to tackle key problems during the construction process. The soft X-ray free-electron laser facility under construction belongs to the fourth-generation light source and there are only three of these in the world, so we should rely more on ourselves," Liu said. Liu belongs to a group of scientific researchers who joined Shanghai Light Source in the early stages of its construction and development.

The synchrotron radiation facility's annual operating and maintenance costs exceed 100 million yuan ($14.92 million). How many conclusions can be drawn from scientific research at the facility? Will it end up being the internal equipment of a few scientific research facilities? The researchers have committed themselves to solving every technical issue in the face of these doubts without altering their goals. They want to make good use of Shanghai Light Source through transparent, scientific, and effective management in addition to turning Shanghai Light Source into a robust facility.

"Shanghai Light Source covers various disciplines and types of topics, and urgent topics can be prioritized," said Li Honghong, a researcher in charge of user management at Shanghai Light Source.

In addition to developing a team of more than 500 people in scientific research, technological development, operation and maintenance services, Shanghai Light Source has also cultivated users throughout its operation.

Only 20 percent of applicants are granted access to the machine in the experimental line station, the busiest area of Shanghai Light Source, but regardless of the institution or research institute the topic belongs to, the line station's researchers always give it their all.

A professor once assigned the researchers to work on a project that called for transporting a hydrogen pipeline several hundred meters long to the line station. The researchers at the line station repeatedly tested the pipeline routing plan and took necessary safety precautions despite never having to deal with a demand like this before to make sure the experiment was finished on time.

Collaboratively innovating key technologies

At the beginning of 2020, Zhou Ruhong, a top international scientist in quantitative biology, ended his 27-year research career in the United States and returned to his alma mater Zhejiang University to teach. As soon as he took office, he received an important task - to build a new R&D institution in Shanghai.

Zhejiang University sent Zhou and Wu Fei, director of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Zhejiang University, to build the new institution. Shanghai also officially implemented the country's first local scientific and technological innovation regulations in May 2020. The regulations relaxed restrictions for the development of new R&D institutions, and grant greater autonomy in terms of talent selection and employment, professional title evaluation, institutional setup, scientific research project approval, and results disposal.

Zhou said that he could better understand the great trust the moment he set foot in Zhangjiang. In the past year or so, more than 10 new R&D institutions focusing on national strategies have settled in Zhangjiang, including the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University, the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute and the Yangtze River Delta National Technology Innovation Center.

Greater autonomy also means more hands-on work such as recruiting talents, applying for projects and managing funds. "Shanghai is a place where rules and integrity are observed and this gives us confidence. Taking laboratory decoration as an example, scientific research institutions need to advance funds first, and then the government will allocate subsidies. As for our new institution, which is under great pressure because we are starting out with nearly no funds, the Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Center Development Office helped us solve funding problems," Zhou said.

In October 2020, Zhou was thinking about finding more cooperation after renovating the laboratory. Xu Lingjie, head of Zhangjiang's GPU chip company Biren Technology, came to the door. How could a chip design company want to collaborate with a quantitative biology research institution?

It turned out that Biren Technology wanted to make breakthroughs in artificial intelligence chips for protein structure prediction and macromolecular drug screening. This cutting-edge technology flows in the same direction as Zhou's research, which involves many key bottleneck technologies, and is exactly what the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University wants to do. The two reached an agreement, and Biren Technology not only provided scientific research funding, but also helped assemble a R&D team within a month. 

Zhangjiang features a complete innovation ecological chain and a higher level of innovation. In the past year, the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University has signed cooperation agreements with more than a dozen leading companies in the fields of artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and smart manufacturing to establish joint R&D centers. At the same time, the institute participated in the preparation of artificial intelligence scientific research institutions and has become a driving force.

The scientific research collaboration in Zhangjiang Science City brings together innovative elements and supports the free exploration in basic frontier fields. The "Hailing Project", for which young scholar Xu Donglian of the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute serves as the chief scientist, not only assembled the four advantageous discipline teams of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, but also received support from national ocean scientific research resources. In just three years, they have successfully developed a prototype device to detect high-energy celestial neutrinos in the depths of the South China Sea, and launched a series of original experiments in the South China Sea in September 2021, making a breakthrough in the field of the detection of high-energy neutrino astronomy in China.

Ecology that helps break through R&D bottlenecks

At the end of 2020, the Yangtze River Delta Sub-center for Drug Evaluation and Inspection and the Yangtze River Delta Sub-center for Medical Device Technology Review and Inspection of the National Medical Products Administration settled in Zhangjiang. Thanks to their settlement, Mabwell, a biomedicine company that was established five years ago in Zhangjiang, has one product approved for marketing, two products submitted for marketing applications, and three products in key clinical trial stages. 

"In Zhangjiang, we have seen the vitality of scientific and technological innovation and a good industrial ecology," said Zhang Jinchao, vice-president of Mabwell. Zhang has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for many years before joining Mabwell. "The founding team of Mabwell has many senior executives from large pharmaceutical companies. Their motivation to start a business comes from Zhangjiang's atmosphere for scientific and technological innovation."

Zhangjiang has a long history of attaching importance to building an innovation chain, and has continued to upgrade the industrial chain with the support of the innovation chain. As early as the beginning of the 21st century, Zhangjiang seized the opportunity of the international transfer of the integrated circuit industry and formed the most complete integrated circuit industrial chain in China, and Zhangjiang Medicine Valley took initial shape with an innovation chain spanning talent training, R&D, test and incubation and scale production. The software industry has also developed rapidly in Zhangjiang, making the place one of the largest software industry export bases in China.

In 2016, some pharmaceutical companies in Zhangjiang developed several independent innovative drugs that entered Phase I and Phase II clinical trials at the same time, but faced the embarrassment of having to change hands. At that time, drug registration and production in China were tied together, and most of the funds for R&D companies were invested in the R&D of new drugs, so they were unable to build their own production lines.

Hou Jin, the full-time deputy director of the Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Center Development Office, said that they were determined to reform. They introduced Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the top 20 biopharmaceutical OEM companies in the world, and built a tailor-made factory for it. A new model in which biomedicine can also be produced by OEM and the drug marketing authorization holder system that has been extended throughout the whole country led to the emergence of innovative drugs.

"What we were thinking about is how to reduce the cost of innovation and unblock the innovation chain. Wherever it is blocked, we will open it up," Hou said. In 2018, Zhangjiang merged the management agencies of Zhangjiang Science City, Zhangjiang Demonstration Zone, and Zhangjiang Comprehensive National Science Center, to establish the Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Center Development Office. Hou said this move is part of institutional innovation.

A magnet gathering innovative talents 

Zhangjiang Science City continues to grow according to the blueprint of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25). Since 2018, Zhangjiang Science City has promoted 257 key projects with a total investment of about 380 billion yuan.

When semiconductor manufacturer SMIC started construction of its office in Zhangjiang, Dai Weimin quit his teaching job at an American university and returned to his hometown of Shanghai to start a chip company. In recent years, he has increasingly felt that Zhangjiang's talents are in short supply, especially in the semiconductor industry.

In 2021, Dai bought a building to use as a R&D center in the Lin-gang Special Area's integrated circuit industry base. He also attended the Shanghai Talent Work Conference in November 2021. Dai proposed at the conference that a scientific and art kindergarten should be built in Zhangjiang, and suggested as the lone corporate speaker, to "find a solution to deal with the childcare difficulties that talents are most concerned about". Officials from the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission spoke with him after the meeting, and after a month, Zhangjiang Science City started looking for a location for the kindergarten.

Hou said that in the current global technology competition, talent management is especially important. Twenty years ago, Shanghai developed a plan to lure talents to Zhangjiang, and they soon emerged as the region's key drivers of innovation and entrepreneurship. Zhangjiang is striving to increase its appeal to talents, Hou added.

For Zhangjiang, which has thrived for 30 years, it is just starting to spread its wings.