December 1, Director of the Center for Innate Immunity and Immune Disease (CIIID) from University of Washington School of Medicine (UWSOM), Prof. Michael Gale Jr., Professor of rheumatology and immunology Edward A. Clark, and Director of the Department of Rheumatology in UWSOM, Prof. Keith Elkon, and their team came to our hospital for a visit and signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with our hospital in the field of rheumatology and immunology. President Weiping Li and Director of the Department of Rheumatology Professor Nan Shen warmly received the guests.

UWSOM, located in Seattle, Washington, in the United States, is one of the world's top medical schools as Harvard Medical School. The UWSOM is the only medical school settled by five states including Washington, Alaska, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. It has an important teaching task for medical students from all the five states (annually training more than 300 medical students). The University of Washington Medical Center consists of 4 hospitals and 12 clinics, and its service radius covers 5 states. The center has more than 26,000 health care workers, 64,000 annual inpatients, and 1.3 million annual outpatients. The primary health care of the Medical Center has been ranking first for 20 consecutive years in the United States. The UWSOM annually get research funding of more than 1 billion US dollars, and is one of the universities which get the largest amount of funding from the National Institutes of Health of the United States. CIIID from UWSOM is focused on pioneering research in the function and regulation of innate immune, development of new treatment strategies for immune dysfunction and other diseases, while cultivating a new generation of scientists in treatment of infectious diseases, tumors and other immune diseases. The center is a global leader in basic science and clinical research in autoimmune diseases, tumors, hereditary diseases, infectious diseases, inflammation, signal transduction, vaccines, treatment and etc.

   President Li extended a warm welcome to the guests. He said that Renji Hospital, located in the international metropolis Shanghai, has paid more attention to the international cooperation and exchanges with first-class of overseas medical schools and medical institutions in recent years. During the "12th Five-Year Plan" period, the hospital had every year invested a lot of budgets for the internationalization of talents, and sent large-scale of young and middle-aged doctors, nurses and scientific researchers to study and exchange in Europe and the United States, among which the largest number of them underwent trainings and studies in the United States. In the "13th Five-Year Plan" period, the hospital will stand on a higher level in internationalization development. In personnel training, we will continue to send young doctors, especially those medical staff who receive doctorate degree under the age of 35, for more than one year of overseas training. The hospital will also launch short-term management training programs, to create a management team with global vision and international management concept. In teaching, as internship teaching base of Shanghai - Ottawa Joint School of Medicine, the hospital will invite world-renowned specialists and professors to teach medical students, and promote international exchanges and upgrading of the relevant disciplines and native teachers. In the field of medical research, the hospital will specifically set the budget to attract overseas experts to come to our hospital and carry out joint research with related specialties. For example, Department of Rheumatology has signed a full-time foreign professor to work in the Sino-Australia Joint Research Centre for Personalized Immunology in our hospital. We hope that through this visit of experts from the University of Washington, our hospital can establish a full range of cooperation and exchanges with the UWSOM in the fields of clinical and research cooperation, as well as graduate training with all the preponderant disciplines in the hospital. The hospital also warmly welcome experts and professors from University of Washington Medical Center to carry out regular research, teaching, and even clinical work in our hospital.

The two sides signed a Memorandum of Cooperation. The cooperation will combine the advantages of respective research areas in CIIID from UWSOM and Shanghai Institute of Rheumatology. They will carry out in-depth research in development of the innate immune system and its regulation mechanism in immune diseases, as well as clinical translational medicine, and to apply related research results to the clinical treatment of the disease. Both sides said that they would take this time of cooperation in the field of rheumatology and immunology as a starting point, to start the comprehensive cooperation between the two sides as soon as possible. In addition, Professor Michael Gale from CIIID of UWSOM, invited delegations from Renji Hospital to visit the United States next year to promote the further cooperation between the two sides on behalf of the UWSOM. (Correspondent Mi Zhou / Translator Weiwei Zhang)