Recently, led by President of John Curtin School of Medicine Professor Simon Foote, the delegation of Australian National University gave an exchange visit to our hospital. Sino-Australian Center for Individualized Immunology (referred to as the Sino-Australian Center) Director Carola G. Vinuesa, Executive Director Dr. Edward Bertram, Principle Investigator Yu Di, Director of Chinese Office of Australian National University Dr. Bai Longman and Translator Mr. Andrew Dawrent accompanied the visit. President Weiping Li, Vice President Huili Dai, Director of Department of Rheumatology Professor Nan Shen and Deputy Director of International Exchange Office Mi Zhou warmly received the guests and made in-depth discussion on the next step of cooperation.

 

 Prof. Weiping Li warmly welcomed Prof. Foote's visit again. He was honored that Professor Vinuesa came to work in Sino-Australian Center of Renji Hospital and expressed his heartfelt thanks for Vinuesa's efforts to accelerate the work of the China-Australia Center. He mentioned that the founder of Department of Rheumatology of Renji Hospital, Professor Shunle Chen set up Department of Rheumatology in the early 1980s after he studied in Australia and returned to Renji. Autoimmune diseases will be one of the important research areas of the next decade, and hopefully the basic research results in the field could bring revolutionary breakthrough in the diagnosis and treatment of the patients with existence of individual differences. President Li admitted that there are some difficulties for the current development of the Central, such as the recruitment of talent, the improvement for efficiency of administrative departments and so on. But the hospital will try to coordinate and increase investment, for example the provision of competitive pay to attract talented people to ensure the smooth developing of the work in the Center, in order to build it a first-class center with international competitiveness.

 

 Professor Foote expressed his heartfelt thanks to President Weiping Li for his support. He briefly reviewed the main achievements since the completion of the China-Australia Center. He said that individualized immunization is a new field of research with a broad development prospects. He is confident that the concerted efforts and complementary advantages of the two sides could build the center into an international first-class research center. The Australian side will also facilitate the joining of the center by providing joint jobs and talents to attract outstanding talents and facilitate the training of our staff in Australia. Professor Foote is also very willing to carry out further cooperation with our hospital in other areas, such as cancer research, and provide technical support in team building, quality control and others for our hospital to build molecular diagnostic center.

 In the end, the two sides discussed the Deul PhD project in detail and reached a consensus on the next step in developing supplementary protocol for questions, such as to normalize the sharing of research results and intellectual property.

(Correspondent Mi Zhou / Translator Weiwei Zhang)