Triangular collaboration: Chen (left) and colleagues at Tsinghua University in China have formed a pharmaceuticals business with US scientific input and finance from Hong Kong (see box on page 178).

Two entrepreneurial scientists at Tsinghua University in Beijing who have recently returned to China from the West provide examples of how venture businesses can be established in Asia even when the climate is far from ideal.

George Guo-Qiang Chen carried out microbiological research in Austria, Britain and Canada before returning to China in 1994. In collaboration with Daniel Shao, a financier in Hong Kong, and Thomas Wagner and other scientists at Ohio University in the United States, he has established Huagen Pharmaceutical, which plans to manufacture biopharmaceuticals based on recombinant peptides produced by transgenic Escherichia coli. Chen could not find investors in China because of legal hurdles and a “huge gap” in culture with the West, which is why he and his collaborators at Ohio turned to Shao.

Under a triangular arrangement, three people in Hong Kong will raise finance for the venture, four researchers at Ohio are developing recombinant organisms, an area pioneered by Wagner, while researchers at Tsinghua with experience in engineering will set up pilot production facilities. One Tsinghua scientist goes to Ohio each year to interact with the US collaborators.

Cheng: forced to look outside China's borders for financial backing for his biochip venture business.

Similarly, Jing Cheng (above), who has just returned to China to head a new biochip research and development centre at the university, is setting up a biochip venture business. Finance is expected to come from the United States, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and possibly mainland China itself.

Cheng started his career as an electrical engineer in a Chinese locomotive factory in 1983. He then went to Strathclyde University in Scotland to do his PhD and developed and patented a rapid DNA extractor in the department of pure and applied chemistry, before going to Aberdeen University's department of molecular and cell biology to develop capillary electrophoresis-based methods for mutation detection. He moved to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine to develop biochips under the sponsorship of PE Applied Biosystems, and then went to the US company Nanogen where he developed a portable bioelectronic chip for field use (see Nature Biotechnology 16,541-546;1998).

Cheng was attracted to Tsinghua by the opportunity to do interdisciplinary research spanning science and engineering, and he hopes Tsinghua will become the first university in China to enter high-tech ventures overseas and actively “borrow” foreign experience.