Che Tuanjie, along with his company Lanzhou Baiyuan Gene-tech, hopes to export traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) to the world as part of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Che set up the company in 2004 after he spent four years in the U.S. as a visiting scholar. The company cooperates with medical experts, educational institutions and hospitals to transform biomedical techniques into medical products.
After over 10 years, the company has developed gene chips that can diagnose early phase colon, bladder and endometrial cancer.
Che believes that his company can focus on TCM because of its forte of molecular biology research.
"The reason why foreigners don't understand and accept TCM is that they don't know its mechanism," said Che. "Each western medicine has an instruction, telling patients its components, function, dosage, mechanism and contraindication, but TCM doesn't. I want to be a translator of TCM, finding out the mechanism of TCM from the angle of molecular biology, so that TCM can be exported to more countries and benefit more people."
President Xi Jinping started promoting the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road in 2013, in what has become known as the "Belt and Road Initiative."
Under the initiative, the Chinese government will introduce supportive policies to export TCM. Che plans to take advantage of this.
The company has already started working with Gansu University of Chinese Medicine and is in talks with other companies. Che is deciding which type of TCM to develop first.
There has actually already been a long history of TCM serving the international community.
Back in the 1970s, Dr. Zhang Tingdong was focusing his research on blood disease. He heard that the poison arsenic was being used by practitioners of TCM to treat cancer in Heilongjiang Province in northeast China.
Zhang then took the treatment to the hospital where he worked to research the treatment.
In 1996, Zhang and his colleagues presented arsenic as a treatment for leukemia to the greater medical community. Since 1998, the international medical community acknowledge the capability of arsenic in treating acute promyelocytic leukemia, and several patients all over the world have benefited from it since.
Che believes the success of Zhang's story lies in rigorous research, and he hopes to emulate it for the success of more TCM techniques.