An aerial view of the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility. CHINA DAILY
When Chinese drug developers need to see exactly how an experimental medicine binds to its target protein, or materials scientists want to understand why a battery or catalyst performs differently at the atomic level, many now turn to the national scientific research facilities.
That marks a notable shift in the role of the country’s “big science” infrastructure. Once used primarily by universities and research institutes for basic research, these scientific facilities are increasingly supporting corporate research and development, while also working directly with enterprises to develop experimental capabilities tailored to industrial needs.
Shanghai, one of China’s largest hubs for major scientific infrastructure, is at the forefront of that transition. The city currently hosts, is constructing or planning 20 major scientific facilities, spanning physics, chemistry, life sciences and marine science, with a total planned investment of about 35 billion yuan ($5.16 billion). Eleven facilities have been completed, including the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, also known as the SSRF, the National Facility for Protein Science in Shanghai and the National Facility for Translational Medicine, according to the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Science and Technology.
Recent data from the commission highlight the surge in industrial demand. In the first half, total operating hours at the SSRF rose 16 percent year-on-year, with corporate usage jumping 44.2 percent, reflecting rising demand from companies using the national facility to support product development and technology innovation.
“The facilities are designed not only to support frontier scientific research, but also to tackle major technological challenges facing industries,” said Wang Tianjing, deputy director of the science infrastructure and platform development division at the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Science and Technology.
The increase follows a series of policy adjustments over the past three years aimed at improving access to the national research infrastructure and encouraging facilities to contribute more directly to industrial innovation.
These measures include a strategic user advisory committee that incorporates feedback from universities, research institutes and technology companies into facility planning and upgrades, as well as a new evaluation mechanism that rewards facilities for contributions to enterprise innovation and industrial technology development.
Researchers at the SSRF say the facility’s relationship with companies has evolved fundamentally over the past decade.
“When the facility first opened, there were very few industrial users,” said Wang Qisheng, director of the life sciences division at the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility Science Center, which is affiliated with the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Today, applications have expanded from structural biology to energy, chemicals, advanced materials, batteries and many other industrial sectors.”
More importantly, companies now require deep scientific expertise rather than mere access to sophisticated equipment.
“Sometimes existing experimental platforms cannot answer new scientific questions,” he said. “In those cases, we work with companies to jointly develop customized experimental equipment and experimental systems.”
This represents an evolution: the facility is no longer just a shared national laboratory, but a scientific partner capable of addressing complex industrial research and development hurdles.
The SSRF currently operates 38 beamlines and 55 experimental stations, allowing multiple experiments to run simultaneously.
External users apply for beam time through peer review, while enterprise users are allocated access according to specific research requirements.
Among the facility’s earliest industrial users is Viva Biotech, a Shanghai-based contract research organization that has collaborated with the SSRF since shortly after the facility opened to users in 2009.
Established in 2008, the company provides structure-based drug discovery services, helping global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies identify and optimize drug candidates using structural biology technologies.
While computer modeling can generate large numbers of potential drug molecules, researchers still need experimental evidence showing whether those molecules interact with proteins as intended. Using synchrotron X-rays, researchers collect diffraction data from protein crystals to reconstruct three-dimensional structures of protein-drug complexes, allowing them to visualize how candidate molecules interact with their biological targets.
“The structural information allows clients to determine whether a molecule has been designed appropriately and how it should be optimized,” said Zhou Yu, a researcher at Viva Biotech.
Zhou added that the collaboration has also become more efficient as the SSRF upgrades its software systems.
“Newer beamlines and domestically developed software have significantly increased throughput and reduced equipment failures, allowing researchers to process substantially more samples during each experimental session than several years ago,” he added.
The trend of co-developing research capabilities is accelerating. A prime example is the collaboration between the SSRF and State-owned energy giant China Petroleum and Chemical Corp, which jointly established what they describe as China’s first dedicated synchrotron platform for the energy and chemical sector.
The platform, which includes three beamlines, provides tailored research capabilities for oil and gas exploration, petrochemicals and new energy materials. Unlike shared beamlines, these are co-developed to address industry-specific technical barriers.
The same model is emerging beyond synchrotron science. At the National Facility for Protein Science in Shanghai, researchers have jointly developed an automated cell-free protein synthesis platform with Kangma (Shanghai) Biotechnology Co, a Shanghai-based biotech company. The platform is now in its final commissioning stage and is expected to begin operating soon.
The system can rapidly convert proteins designed by artificial intelligence into physical samples for experimental verification, helping address one of the biggest bottlenecks in AI-driven protein research.
“The bottleneck is no longer protein design,” said Wu Jiarui, director of the National Facility for Protein Science in Shanghai. “AI can generate protein sequences very quickly, but they still have to be synthesized and experimentally verified.”
The platform is designed as shared research infrastructure serving universities, research institutes and biotechnology companies, integrating AI-assisted protein design, automated synthesis and structural verification into a single workflow.
As Chinese companies move into increasingly sophisticated fields ranging from innovative medicines to advanced materials and clean energy, researchers at the facilities say demand is increasingly centered not on access to expensive machines, but on customized scientific capabilities that help solve problems conventional R&D tools cannot.
“We don’t simply provide equipment,” Wang Qisheng said. “For many frontier industrial problems, we work together with companies to develop the experimental approaches needed to solve them.”
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