COVID opens new doors for China’s gene giant

BGI Group, described in one 2015 study as “Goliath” in the fast-growing field of genomics research, is using an opening created by the pandemic to expand its footprint globally. In the past six months, it says it has sold 35 million rapid COVID-19 testing kits to 180 countries and built 58 labs in 18 countries. Some of the equipment has been donated by BGI’s philanthropic arm, promoted by China’s embassies in an extension of China’s virus diplomacy.

But as well as test kits, the company is distributing gene-sequencing technology that US security officials say could threaten national security. This is a sensitive area globally. Sequencers are used to analyse genetic material, and can unlock powerful personal information.

In science journals and online, BGI is calling on international health researchers to send in virus data generated on its equipment, as well as patient samples that have tested positive for COVID-19, to be shared publicly via China’s government-funded National GeneBank.

As BGI’s foothold in the gene-sequencing industry grows, a senior US administration official told Reuters on condition of anonymity, so does the risk China could harvest genetic information from populations around the world.

Underpinning BGI’s global expansion are the Shenzhen-based company’s links to the Chinese government, which include its role as operator of China’s national genetic database and its research in government-affiliated key laboratories. BGI, which says in stock market filings it aims to help the ruling Communist Party achieve its goal to “seize the commanding heights of international biotechnology competition,” is coming under increasing scrutiny in an escalating Cold War between Washington and Beijing, Reuters found.

Reuters found no evidence that BGI is violating patient privacy protections where these apply. Responding to questions from the news agency, BGI said it is not owned by the Chinese government.

“In the existing political climate, the concern generated by the use of the BGI generation is unfounded and misleading,” BGI told Reuters. “The BGI project is, and at all times, has been to use genomics to improve people’s fitness and well-being.”

China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the country had shown openness, transparency and accountability by “sharing data and reports with the foreign community, offering materials to the countries concerned,” adding COVID-19 verification kits and protection equipment, and helping countries improve epidemic control

The scope of BGI’s efforts to dominate a geostrategic industry, as well as its efforts to gather genetic knowledge from around the world, has been reconstructed through Reuters from public documents and dozens of interviews with scientists, researchers and fitness officials.

Some U.S. officials warn of a double threat to national security in the BGI component: sensitive genetic data on U.S. citizens would likely fall into foreign hands, and U.S. corporations threaten to waste their merits of genomic innovation for Chinese corporations.

Earlier this year, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) issued a practical aptitude recommendation to avoid “potential threats posed by foreign powers” in relation to COVID-19 testing. Other officials draw parallels between BGI and Huawei Technologies Co, China’s telecommunications titan, whose 5G technology, according to the United States, can be used to capture the non-public knowledge that Beijing can exploit. Huawei said he would refuse to cooperate with espionage.

Data sharing is for medical research. But in the case of genetic data, officials and scientists say the dangers are that they can become a weapon.

People can be known through part of their DNA, and some researchers have discovered genetic links to behaviors such as depressive disorder. A hostile actor can use knowledge to attack Americans for surveillance, extortion, or manipulation, according to a comprehensive report ready for the U.S. Director of National Intelligence’s Office. Through clinical and medical experts in January, he added that such associations are still well understood.

Knowledge of the genetic makeup of national or military decision-makers, and their propensity to act safely, can only be used through conflicting intelligence agencies as a mechanism to influence, according to the report, “Saving the Bioeconomy”, national academies. science, engineering and medicine. Genetic knowledge can reveal a U.S. vulnerability. To express illness, he added.

As corporations rush to expand and patent biological drugs for the global market, the ethnic diversity of the American population makes American genomic knowledge more valuable than the knowledge of countries with homogeneous populations, according to the report. In fact, the more varied the knowledge, the greater the merits of identifying genetic diseases. The report raised the option that BGI can only collect dna sequence data from American genetic samples, giving it “asymmetrical” credit to U.S. corporations.

Genetic information, which adds a circle of family medical history, “is hugely priced and can be exploited through foreign regimes for economic purposes,” Bill Evanina, ncSC director, told Reuters in response to questions about Chinese genomic companies.

BGI and Huawei have said they work together. In a video that is no longer available on Huawei’s site, a BGI executive said it processes “staggering volumes of data” from its gene sequencers, stored on Huawei’s high-powered systems. In response to questions from Reuters about whether this information could be shared with China’s government, Huawei said only users of its technology can define who to share data with. “Huawei’s Cloud technology and cloud computing services are secure and compliant with international security standards,” it said, adding it complies with all laws.

BGI said it does not have access to patient data from its diagnostic tests.

The company said it is conducting clinical studies on genomes, or genetics, of the virus and patients with COVID-19. But he said the studies are separated from the evidence he provided to other countries to diagnose COVID-19.

When asked about China’s genomic ambitions, a U.S. State Department spokesman. He said: “We countries want to make sure that providers do not threaten national security, privacy or intellectual property. Trust cannot exist when a company is an issue for an authoritarian government, such as the People’s Republic of China, which has no prohibitions on the misuse of data.”

FROM “WHO1” TO THE EYE OF FIRE

BGI has been concerned about China’s reaction to coronavirus from the beginning. Scientists were among those who sequenced the genome of the virus and shared this data in January.

On Dec 26, BGI collected and tested a throat swab from a 44-year-old man who was a patient in the military hospital in Wuhan, according to a record of the sequence that was shared with other researchers on a global database. The World Health Organisation (WHO) learned of cases of pneumonia of an unknown cause in Wuhan on Dec 31; the blueprint of the patient’s virus was named WHO1.

The week after the first test, BGI took samples from 3 other hospital patients who had visited the local seafood market, according to an article published by Chinese scientists in The Lancet on January 29. BGI sequences those samples.

By the end of the month, the company had designed an automated lab for the Wuhan government to build massive evidence. BGI called the design “Eye of Fire”, in the mythical king of Chinese monkeys to see the threats disguised.

The labs have been replicated in China and the Mammoth Foundation, a charity created a few months earlier through BGI, has started donating tests and laboratories around the world. In the middle of the year, BGI’s COVID-19 laboratory apparatus was installed in at least 10 countries through charitable donations, corporate statements and local reports.

The Chinese government helped coordinate some of the BGI agreements. Solomon Islands said it won a check for $300,000 from the Chinese Embassy, which begged the island country to buy evidence and laboratory equipment from BGI. China’s Foreign Ministry said China had done the most productive thing for the protection and reliability of medical supplies.

Besides donations, BGI has reported lab deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As technicians in white protective suits build Fire Eye labs in countries from Australia to Saudi Arabia, BGI Genomics, a listed subsidiary of the group, said last month demand would help boost profits by 700% for the first half of the year to more than $218 million.

POWERFUL INFORMATION

BGI’s COVID-19 programme has two aspects.

First, diagnostic verification kits, equipped with high-speed remedy robots to treat giant volumes, paint through the detection of genetic curtains of the virus in a patient’s pattern to determine if a user has been infected. BGI states that these checks do not provide access to patient data.

The currently element, which the company offers in addition to its marketing materials, is the genetic sequencing team.

In the pandemic, researchers around the world use sequencers to track virus mutations, see what mutation is spreading, and strains or samples to paints for vaccine development.

The request for DNA sequencers is also the basis of their role in a lucrative medical box known as precision medicine or medicine.

Rather than seek one-drug-suits-all treatments, precision medicine focuses on how different people’s genes interact with their environment to help predict their risk of disease, or their response to medications.

In July, BGI Genomics, BGI’s listed subsidiary on the Shenzhen stock exchange filed for a $293 million capital hike, telling investors in the filing their support would help it collect as much patient data as possible, “on the human body, genome, people’s living habits and environment, so we can understand more, and diagnose in a more precise way.”

The company also announced its goal of announcing Fire Eye Laboratories that it implements for COVID-19 accurately after the pandemic.

FROM CUSTOMER TO RIVAL

BGI was established through 4 scientists in 1999 as a non-profit research organization called the Beijing Genomics Institute, to allow China to enroll in a global human genome mapping project. Since 2016, its headquarters are home to and operated by the government-funded China National GeneBank, a biorepertory of 20 million genetic samples of plants, animals and humans.

In 2010, BGI won a $1.5 billion loan from the Development Bank of China, a state bank, some of which were used to acquire 128 sequence machines from a U.S. company, Illumina Inc., in San Diego.

Two years later, Beijing said in a State Council plan for bioindustry that it was looking for China to expand genetic sequencing technology. In 2013, BGI controlling buying Illumina’s largest competitor, California-based Complete Genomics, for $118 million. He is now the American study arm of the Chinese organization. BGI Group introduced its own sequencing apparatus in 2015; The organization launched BGI Genomics in 2017.

This year, BGI Genomics told investors it charged $95 million for a total human genome series in 2001. In 2014, Illumina announced that she had reduced the charge to less than $1,000. Now BGI can do it for $600.

In May, MGI Tech, BGI’s subsidiary that manufactures DNA sequencers, raised $1 billion in capital.

But after BGI indicated that it would launch its sequencers in the United States, it faced a challenge: an allegation of infringement of Illumina’s property. In June, a U.S. court issued an initial court order prohibiting the sale, distribution or promotion of the BGI apparatus and apparatus, pending a trial to determine whether the generation was copied from Illumina.

In search of the court order, Illumina’s lawyers told the court: “BGI is making plans for over-value rebates and ambitious sales opposing Illumina.”

BGI declined to comment on the case. In court papers, BGI denied infringing Illumina’s patents and asked that parts of the injunction be put on hold while it appealed the ruling. Illumina told Reuters COVID-19 will boost sequencer demand.

“MORE VALUABLE THAN GOLD”

With a price tag of between $20,000 for a portable model and $1 million for a powerful machine, gene sequencers are an important part of a country’s pandemic armoury.

Even before the new coronavirus, in October 2019, the Ethiopian government announced that it would create a genomics laboratory with devices donated through BGI. Months later, Illumina donated sequencers to 10 African countries to monitor the virus, the US corporation said.

At least five countries worldwide have received BGI’s sequencers with the Fire Eye labs, according to statements the countries or BGI have released. In many cases BGI does not own or operate the Fire Eye laboratories, but simply provides the equipment, the company told Reuters.

For BGI, sequencers offer more than money. It has said they will also help it study the virus in large populations.

One of the beneficiaries of the BGI sequencing apparatus is Serbia, the Balkan country where Beijing has invested heavily in its One Belt, One Road initiative to open industrial ties with Chinese companies. Two labs have opened there. Both were donated through Chinese companies, Beijing and Belgrade said.

After the first lab was opened, coordinator Jelena Begovic told Reuters in May that DNA sequencers help researchers link genetic data about the virus with genetic data about the patient. In the future, he said, the labs would cooperate with BGI.

“Today, data is more valuable than gold,” she says. “In this sense, it is also a source of data for them about this region.”

Prime Minister Ana Brnabic said in an opening rite that after the pandemic, “we will have the world-class laboratory, which will allow us to start arguing with BGI on how to build the ultimate complex institute for precision and genetic medicine in this region.” “

Sweden also won the BGI sequencing apparatus. Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Stockholm, hopes to use it to identify one more human genotype to the disease, microbiology professor Lars Engstrand said in a presentation on the BGI website.

Asked by Reuters about the risk Swedish genomic data may be collected by the Chinese government, Engstrand said this was “a very relevant question” and the institute’s IT security department had scrutinised its collaboration with BGI.

“No serial data will be sent to other servers or computers outside of our institute,” said Engstrand, who runs the institute’s Translational Microbiome Research Center, in an email. “No cloud solution will be used for this sensitive data.”

He was unsure if the institute would go ahead with sequencing human genomes, he added.

“Nice stay”

Researchers globally are sharing virus data, but BGI has also set up its own sharing platform, the “Global Initiative on Open-source Genomics” for the new coronavirus.

In a topic related to China National GeneBank, giogs.genomics.cn, invites foreign scientists to submit virus data, adding the patient’s age, gender and location, collected in accordance with local regulations.

“At first, you will be asked to make a percentage of the genome knowledge of the virus with the public (National GeneBank),” the site says.

In return, the site offers sequencing and “considerable support” for loading kits and reagents.

BGI told Reuters it had received no patient samples under this new programme – samples have been sequenced in local facilities.

It said its goal is to “develop more high-quality genome data of (the) virus with BGI’s sequencing solution.” It said it wants to facilitate the rapid and open sharing of genome data to support research on the virus.

In addition to National GeneBank, BGI’s headquarters also houses at least 4 government-designated “key laboratories” for genomic studies, which are also government-funded. BGI stated that this investment is used for studies and operations.

One of the laboratories supported an examination conducted through a dozen BGI researchers who sequenced the genomes of more than three hundred COVID-19 patients at a Shenzhen hospital, according to an article they shared at MedRvix, for previously published clinical articles.

“We and others continue to recruit patients and knowledge in China and around the world for the host genetic background that underlies the other clinical outcomes of patients,” the researchers wrote.

As rapid COVID-19 tests are adopted globally, the researchers added, it will be important to study patients who don’t show symptoms. The study’s lead author didn’t respond to questions from Reuters.

SAFETY DEVICES

The increase in the pandemic in BGI occurs at a time of tensions between China and the United States, over China’s genetic program.

Two BGI subsidiaries were blacklisted through the U.S. Department of Commerce last month for alleged human rights violations in China. Washington alleged that BGI was concerned about genetic research by Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, western China, where UN experts and activists say Muslims have been detained in detention centres.

BGI said in a statement that it “does not tolerate and would never be concerned about human rights violations.” The Chinese government claims that the camps are educational and vocational education establishments and denies that they violate the human rights of detainees.

The Chinese security appliance is a BGI client. Another BGI subsidiary, Forensic Genomics International, says it is operating with china’s Office of Public Security. He had several contracts with the police to collect male DNA samples, as well as samples from some newborns, according to research conducted this year through the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

BGI stated that the forensic branch complied with clinical ethics and the law. The Foreign Ministry declined to comment.

This story published from a firm thread without converting the text.

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