Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) first emerged in January, Qiming Venture Partners' portfolio companies have been actively taking measures to cope with the challenging situation in China. Below is a summary of their efforts during the outbreak.
Healthcare Portfolio
In the biopharma sector, our portfolios have been expediting the R&D of drugs and vaccines. Sino Biological released the recombinant protein 2019-nCoV Spike-RBD for research and therapeutic antibody development. Insilico Medicine is reported to have designed six new molecules that could halt viral replication. The company also opened up its database of drug compounds to global pharmaceutical companies for free, hoping to find a cure quickly for the coronavirus.
In the diagnosis sector, companies have provided various diagnosis approaches to support clinical decisions. InferVision launched the coronavirus AI solution to accelerate pneumonia diagnosis and epidemic monitoring. "While a manual read of a CT scan can take up to 15 minutes, AI can finish reading the image in 10 seconds," as The Lancet featured InferVision in a news article published on Feb. 20th. Other diagnosis portfolios, including Tisenc Medical, BioScience, AmoyDx (SZSE:300685), Rendu, etc., rapidly developed various detection kits and tests during the virus outbreak.
Qiming's medical service portfolio - Arrail Dental, Qiangsen Hospital, WeDoctor, ShanZhen, Miaoshou Doctor, MedScience, to name a few - started providing online health services in the early virus outbreak to lessen the workload for offline physical hospitals, as well as to ensure the citizens can get professional medical services and suggestions online.
Ms. Lanjuan Li, the founder of Shulan Health, was appointed as an adviser to the National Health Commission. Chain Medical Labs partnered with two emergency hospitals (Leishenshan Hospital and Huoshenshan Hospital) to provide diagnosis services in Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. Berry Genomics (SZSE:000710) was selected by the Fuzhou Government as the novel coronavirus nucleic acid detection organization. CanSino Biologics (HKSE:6185) was commissioned by the Tianjin government to take the lead in carrying out the research and development of new coronavirus vaccine.
TMT Portfolio
Our AI portfolios have leveraged their advantages in tech capacities to improve the efficiency of local governments and organizations. UBTech, an AI company that develops intelligent humanoid robots, launched new AI-enabled body temperature detection solutions, which enabled officers to complete body temperature screenings without close physical contact with people. Unisound, an AI company specializing in voice recognition and language processing, developed a robot to collect information by making automatic phone calls to residents and enterprises.
Portfolio companies that provide cloud computing platforms and to-B services are gaining more interests from society. Tungee is a provider of enterprise sales forecasting platforms. After the virus outbreak, the company launched a SaaS (software as a service) platform tailored for the epidemic areas where people cannot travel for work. The SasS platform enabled companies to conduct customer development, communications, and sales activities online. Tungee has provided 100 sets of intelligent sales cloud platforms to enterprises for free.
Online education portfolios are seeing many needs from parents and students in the past few weeks. Kaola Reading and Xuebajun have provided coupons and free online courses to teenagers in Hubei province.
Offerings and Donations
Over the past few weeks, many of our portfolios have been donating medical equipment, medical supplies, face masks, professional systems and cash to the hospitals and organizations in need.
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