China's translational charge

On the heels of BioCentury's China Healthcare Summit in Shanghai, has quantitated the growing role that researchers in China play in making discoveries with translation potential, using the number of items published in the Distillery as a marker of innovative translational science with commercial potential.There was a nearly seven-fold increase in the number of Distillery items covering Chinese research from the six months beginning in July 2011 (6 items) to the peak at six months beginning in July 2014 (41 items), with a slightly slower pace in the first half of 2015. During the two-year period from July 2013 to June 2015, more than half of the Therapeutics Distillery items covering research from China were in cancer (59 items), which was higher than the global average of 41% for cancer items from all regions. During the same period, nearly half of all Techniques Distillery items from China were on innovations in drug platforms (15 items), about double the global average. Studies from three institutions - , the Second Military Medical University, and the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, - accounted for 39% (42 out of 109) of Distillery items from China during that two-year period. Institutions from the same city are matched by color. and have typically published about 500-600 Distillery items selected from about 7,500-10,000 articles published per six-month period. (*) Includes items counted in multiple categories. (**) CAS - Chinese Academy of Sciences.