Ruijin hospital will set up Shanghai’s first Air Ambulance Center Base hospital. It will be tasked with building professional air ambulance service teams, formulating transfer standards and mechanisms through cooperation with local health authorities, the medical emergency center and other government departments. The city’s first helicopter equipped with first aid facilities will be introduced this year. At least five medical helicopters are needed to transport patients from different parts of the city and the Yangtze delta to hospitals. China and Czechia signed an air aid cooperation program. Under the program the Prague medical emergency services will over the next two years carry out training of medics, paramedics and managerial personnel at Ruijin hospital.

Malaysian hospital operator IHH Healthcare, an investor in Hong Kong’s private Gleneagles Hospital, will take a proactive approach to further expand its presence in China, seeking to tap the growing appetite for private health care among the rising middle class. Tan See Leng, Chief Executive of IHH, said the company would focus on the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Bohai Bay and central and western parts of China. “We have enough reserves to continue to fund our expansions in China,” Tan told reporters during a conference in Shanghai. “We believe this is a huge growth market.” He wouldn’t disclose the size of the potential investments in China, but added that IHH would consider merging with existing operators or buying them outright to reinforce its foray into the market. China will become IHH’s fifth market after Malaysia, Singapore, Turkey and India, Tan said. The company aims to become a market leader in China’s foreign-funded private hospital sector, and has already broken ground on a CNY1.36 billion hospital in the Hongqiao area of Shanghai. The 450-bed Gleneagles Shanghai Hospital, expected to open in 2020, will focus on several key specialties including cardiology, cardiac surgery, gastroenterology, urology, minimally invasive surgery, general surgery and internal medicine. China relaxed rules on foreign investment in health care in 2014 allowing the establishment of private hospitals with 100% foreign ownership. About 200 of China’s private hospitals have foreign shareholders, the South China Morning Post reports.

China is set to publish its first national list of rare diseases to improve diagnoses and speed up drug approvals. Rare illnesses, by definition affecting only a small group of people, are often genetic and costly to treat or control. But they are an increasingly significant segment of the market, and of big pharmaceutical firms’ profits. Global sales of so-called “orphan” drugs to treat rare diseases are set to increase to USD209 billion in the next five years from USD124 billion this year. The niche sector of rare diseases is an important growth driver for companies like Celgene, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson and Shire. “China, with the largest population in the world, should also have the largest population of rare diseases,” said Peter Fang of Shire, which focuses on rare illnesses and a portfolio of specialist therapies. It sells immunology and haemophilia drugs in China. He estimated that for some rare illnesses, like Fabry disease, caused by the build-up of fat-like substances, fewer than 5% of patients in China are diagnosed. There are an estimated 16 million Chinese with rare diseases, the South China Morning Post reports.

China’s bid to become a superpower in the nascent field of precision medicine took another step forward last week after genomics information specialist WuXi NextCode closed a USD75 million Series B funding round. Yunfeng Capital, a Chinese private equity firm co-founded by Alibaba Group Executive Chairman Jack Ma, and Singapore investment company Temasek, led the new financing. The proceeds will be used to commercialize its products, strengthen its global leadership in informatics, and expand its capabilities in artificial intelligence and deep learning technologies. Precision medicine is customized health care based on the genetic make-up, medical history and lifestyle of a patient. In March last year, the central government launched the China Precision Medicine Initiative, a 15-year project with USD9.2 billion in funding that aims to build up the country’s credentials as a global leader in precision medicine. “Genomics is the crossroad where data and biology meet,” said Ge Li, Chairman of WuXi NextCode as well as Founder and Chairman of parent WuXi AppTec. WuXi NextCode – with offices in Shanghai, Cambridge (Massachusetts, U.S.) and Reykjavik (Iceland) – represents a new wave of Chinese companies looking to follow the lead of Shenzhen-based BGI and Novogene in Beijing to become major global services providers in the study and sequencing of genes and their functions, the South China Morning Post reports.

China reported six new cases of H7N9 bird flu including one death in Hunan province after live poultry markets in the province were closed last month. The infections were reported in the last week of March by the provincial center for disease control and prevention. A total ban on live poultry trading in Changsha had been in effect since March 17 and would continue for another five days. In March, the authorities reported an outbreak of the virus in the province originating from a farm with about 29,760 infected birds. More than 170,000 birds were culled as a result. The number of human infections this season has surged to the highest level since 2009, with at least 162 deaths reported since October. Health authorities said that cold and wet weather in Hunan played a role in the recent spread of the virus. Medical specialists have said attempts by authorities to curb the spread of the H7N9 bird flu virus in live poultry markets came too late, with officials failing to take preventative steps before the peak flu season started. The H7N9 virus shows little or no clinical symptoms in poultry, complicating detection, but authorities should have stepped up their surveillance going into the peak season, the specialists said.