Engineering Cells, Benefiting Patients — Genecast Honoured with Shandong Provincial First Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress

By Ron Chen, Bureau Chief, Asia

On August 6, the Shandong Provincial Science and Technology Conference was held in Jinan, where the 2025 Shandong Provincial Science and Technology Awards were officially announced. The project titled “Key Technologies for Compact Automated Bioculture Equipment,” jointly submitted by Genecast Biotechnology Co., Ltd., in collaboration with Qingdao Haier Biomedical Co., Ltd., Shandong University, and the Shandong Analysis and Testing Center, stood out among numerous competing proposals. Professor Zuo Wei of Genecast was honored with the First Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress of Shandong Province.

This accolade comes hot on the heels of Genecast’s recent receipt of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Global Award, marking yet another major recognition of the company’s technological innovation capabilities. The dual affirmation—from both international authorities and the highest provincial-level honors in China—fully underscores the company’s leading position in the fields of regenerative medicine and cell therapy.

Cell therapy technology represents a strategic high ground in global scientific competition. However, its core production processes have long been plagued by the challenges of “manual operations.” Variations in individual operators’ experience directly affect batch-to-batch consistency, making it difficult for traditional models to meet the stringent demands for scalability and standardization required by advanced therapies. Developing independently controllable cell culture equipment and processes has thus become an urgent priority for industrial upgrading.

To address this industrial bottleneck, Genecast joined forces with Haier Biomedical to deeply integrate cutting-edge technologies including automation, intelligence, informatization, artificial intelligence, and image processing. Together, they developed the “Xianhe No.1” — an intelligent automated cell preparation platform built upon the R-Clone technology platform.

Leveraging a smart cellular big-data management system, the “Xianhe No.1” enables one-stop, full-process cell manufacturing—from inoculation, plating, observation, medium exchange, passaging, and culture, all the way to harvest. The platform employs a fully enclosed design to maintain a dynamic Grade A clean environment, effectively reducing contamination risks. Combined with AI-powered image recognition, it enables intelligent assessment of cell status, greatly enhancing process stability. For a long time, core cell-culture equipment in China has been heavily dependent on imports. The successful development of “Xianhe No.1” has effectively reduced this dependency. The performance data are equally impressive: full-process automation efficiency is 150 per cent higher than manual operation. This breakthrough signifies that cell manufacturing is transitioning from reliance on manual expertise to a standardized, reproducible, and scalable production paradigm.

This Shandong Provincial First Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress is not only an authoritative endorsement of the project’s technical achievements but also a strong testament to Genecast’s long-term dedication and collaborative innovation capabilities in the cell therapy field. It also marks a pivotal step forward in the company’s drive to upgrade cell therapy from “manual experience” to “intelligent manufacturing.” The broader application of these outcomes will powerfully support China in overcoming the “bottleneck” challenges of automated, standardized, and intelligent bioculture equipment, providing robust theoretical and technical backing for the high-quality development of cell therapy in Shandong and across the nation, with vast prospects for application.

Looking ahead, Genecast will continue to deepen industry-university-research collaborations, focus on cutting-edge technologies in cell regeneration, increase R&D investment, and accelerate the achievement of more independent core technological breakthroughs—contributing a benchmark strength to the global cell industry.