On 3 January 2024 the Xihu District science and technology innovation conference was held, bringing together district leadership, provincial and municipal departments, academics from local universities and institutes, and representatives of technology companies and investors — nearly a thousand people, making it the district’s largest innovation conference in recent years.
The conference recognised outstanding technology companies, and Westlake Pharmaceuticals received the 2023 Xihu District “university economy benchmark project” award.
Speakers included Guili Tong, party secretary of the Zhejiang Department of Science and Technology; Weihua Xu, standing committee member of the Hangzhou municipal party committee; Yumin Dong, party secretary of Xihu District; Jianyu Wang, president of the Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, UCAS; Tian Xu, vice president of Westlake University; and Feipeng Yu, general manager of Zhejiang University Holdings.
The conference also released action plans to make Xihu District the preferred destination for technology transfer and to build innovation circles around its universities. The district’s ten leading technology companies of 2023, university-economy benchmark projects and achievements, and its first “technology commandos” were presented; 11 industry-academia-research bases were recognised; and key technology cooperation and industrial projects were signed.
The review panel spoke highly of the company’s progress. Its first product, Mprosevir®, was then in the pre-approval application stage: an oral small molecule against coronaviruses with fully independent intellectual property, an entirely new scaffold and the first non-covalent 3CL protease inhibitor in China.
Mprosevir® was discovered by Westlake University and Westlake Laboratory, and is being developed by Westlake Pharmaceuticals — a successful test of the Westlake model of innovation.
The award recognises past work and encourages the team. Westlake Pharmaceuticals will keep exploring how academic results become industrial products, and pursue more breakthroughs from 0 to 1.