Guangzhou

The bustling streets of Guangzhou — the centre of last winter's outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) — no longer show much evidence of the panic that gripped the region. But the epidemic led to an array of changes in research and public health that are just beginning to make themselves felt.

This summer, plans were laid to establish a new health-research institute in the city itself. Reforms of China's biomedical research infrastructure — including the establishment of a Chinese version of the main US biomedical research agency, the National Institutes of Health(NIH) — have acquired fresh momentum. And work is under way to build or refurbish a network of laboratories with the aim of equipping them to handle dangerous pathogens.

Plans for the Guangzhou institute were confirmed on 5 July, when the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the city's government and the province of Guangdong each agreed to invest 100 million yuan (US$12 million) in the project. The institute will be established on a new science park in western Guangzhou. A director, charged with assembling a dozen teams to do research there, will be named by the end of October.

The institute's backers say that they aim to attract a strong contingent of researchers from outside China and to establish the facility as a base for international cooperation in health research. Its areas of specialization have yet to be determined, but may include cardiovascular disease and cancer, as well as emerging diseases.

This incubator facility in Guangzhou's science park awaits the arrival of the new research institute.

More far-reaching are proposals for a national, grant-giving biomedical research agency modelled on the NIH. The proposal was made public in a statement earlier this year by 22 senior researchers, including Zhu Chen, vice president of the CAS.

Most biomedical research in China is supported directly through branches of the academy, but advocates of the proposal want an agency that would distribute competitive grants, as the NIH does. “We need to have stable support that can build a health-research community,” says Chen.

This month, a group of some 20 senior Chinese scientists worldwide, led by Ray Wu, a plant biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and Yi Rao, an anatomist and neurobiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, appealed to China's prime minister Wen Jiabao to support the idea. Wu says that the group has now been asked to provide a more detailed version of its letter.

The letter criticizes what it calls China's underinvestment in biomedical research, compared with other countries. It cites the need for an organization that can carry out “a fair and transparent peer-review system”. China's research structure — dominated by the CAS — has been criticized for lacking such a system.

The organization would initially distribute extramural grants, although in the future it could also support its own laboratories, as the NIH does. The NIH's annual budget of $27 billion represents about 0.27% of the US economy, Rao says, and the proposal calls for a Chinese equivalent to spend 0.14% of China's economic product over the next ten years.

Despite Chen's support, the plan is likely to meet stiff opposition from other CAS officials, who want to retain their central position in Chinese biomedical research.

Meanwhile, many laboratories in China are pressing forward with construction of biosafety laboratories that meet the international P3 standard, which is required for most work on infectious diseases, and even the P4 standard for work on the most dangerous pathogens.

But the drive lacks coordination, researchers say. “No one can keep track of them,” says Yun Zhang, a specialist at the CAS's Kunming Institute of Zoology in the province of Yunnan, which is spending 20 million yuan on labs in each class to house primate models for the study of SARS.