A unit of Shanghai-based WuXi NextCODE has joined with Chinese telecoms maker Huawei Technologies to launch an offering dubbed the China Precision Medicine Cloud that is expected to feed into a massive precision medicine program in China. Details of the national plan are not fully known.
The venture by New WuXi Life Science and Shenzhen-based Huawei, according to their release, would support an initiative in the works that journal Nature said in January would "dwarf efforts" in precision medicine and genomic screening that allow doctors to target drugs for patients announced last year by the U.S.
Nature said Chinese officials plan to spend more than $9 billion on precision medicine efforts over the course of 15 years, compared to about $215 million for the U.S. multiyear effort.
In the case of China, the aim would be to fund hundreds of separate projects, Nature said
This fits in with the new venture, first announced in March, which would store genomic information and make it available via a nationwide online network. WuXi NextCODE is already busy in the space on several fronts in China, with a pact late last year to provide genetic testing services for the Children's Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai.
The exact reach of China’s Precision Medicine Initiative has not been formally announced, though the early comments from experts in the field suggest an eventual clinical structure that would see patients gaining access to genomic screening for more accurate diagnostic and treatment options.
The release said the services could be offered even more widely with WuXi AppTec and WuXi NextCODE solutions, in sync with many of the standards in the field now used in the United States.
- here's the release