Innovation Zhejiang: Oujiang Lab-- A New “Strong Magnetic Field” to Attract Talents and Reach New Heights in Life and Health Sciences

Oujiang Lab:

Create a “Strong Magnetic Field” to Attract Talents and Reach New Heights in Life and Health Sciences

Qihang Building, the first research space of Oujiang Lab, is situated on the banks of the Oujiang River. “Covering 20,000 square meters, the first phase, together with an interim lab of around 10,000 square meters, provides us with an efficient, secure and comfortable space for scientific research." Prof. Cao Tong of Oujiang Lab said.

As a key for Wenzhou to become a science and technology innovation hub and adhering to the principle of “ with the applied research as the mainstay and fundamental and applied research reinforcing each other”, Oujiang Lab focuses on basic research on tissue and organ regeneration and remodeling, eye disease and vision rehabilitation, brain disease and cognitive rehabilitation, with the aim to break through bottleneck problems and major difficulties. The Oujiang Lab project is listed as one of the major projects of strengthening the basics of scientific and technological innovation of Zhejiang with a total planned land area of 400,000 square meters and a five-year construction budget of 6.8 billion yuan.

"A favorable environment allows scientific researchers to concentrate on research and be more innovative." According to Oujiang Lab, Qihang Building is already operating at full capacity in just one year. Therefore, the laboratory is constructing the 220,000-square-meter main park and the 30,000-square-meter translational medicine research base at a faster pace, of which the main park will be the largest "scientific research base" in Wenzhou.

The establishment of various high-level public technology service platforms in Oujiang Lab best demonstrates the progress of hard environment construction. Seven public technology service platforms, including large-scale medical science facility, bio-medicine big data and supercomputing center, and clinical biology large sample database, are under construction or have been put into trial operation, ensuring the progressive advancement of scientific research. “After being officially put into use, it is expected to meet basic research needs of the lab in life sciences, and provide strong equipment and technical support to solve bottleneck problems in the fields of regulation of regeneration and eye and brain health." Lin Tao, head of Oujiang Lab's technical support platform, said.

The lab has become a talent magnet thanks to the hard environment of scientific research. In just two years, Oujiang Lab has recruited 218 high-level R&D personnel and developed a talent pool of over 700 members and 50 scientific research teams, including 22 full-time PIs (researchers), 11 postdoctoral fellows, and 275 graduate students under joint degree programs. A new research system of R&D institutions featuring field-specific high-level talent teams has begun to take shape. Talents have made positive contributions to the remarkable achievements of scientific research. Oujiang Lab has published 560 academic papers in international academic journals such as Nature, JCI, and PNAS; representative achievements include discovering the structural basis for FGF hormone signaling, providing new pathways for the therapeutics for human metabolic diseases and cancer; revealing the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's disease caused by dysregulation of USP25 and found potential drug targets, and discovering a new strategy to induce sustained diabetes remission with a single injection of FGF4...

Oujiang Lab stated: "We will continue to make steady progress in scientific innovation, endeavor to rise to the top of basic research in regulation of regeneration, eye and brain health and other fields, and drive a trillion-yuan industry to serve the development of life and health industry, making new contributions to the high-quality development of Wenzhou as one of the top three cities in Zhejiang, while sparing no effort to prioritize common prosperity and provincial modernization.

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