A dedicated industrial matchmaking and investment event linked to the Tengchong Scientists Forum has wrapped up in Tengchong, a border city in southwest China's Yunnan province, with six deals worth a combined 350 million RMB signed during the proceedings.

The event, focused on key sectors including biomedicine, holistic health and green food processing, and connected local government bodies, enterprises and investors via on-site project inspections and industry dialogue salons, advancing the on-the-ground implementation of cooperation outcomes forged at the Tengchong Scientists Forum.

From lab breakthroughs to full-scale mass production, and from standalone medicinal herb farming to integrated developing a fully integrated industrial cluster, Yunnan is using the high-profile forum as a critical bridge to turn scientific and technological potential into tangible growth momentum.

For years, the Panax notoginseng industry in Yunnan — a medicinal herb widely used in traditional Chinese medicine with cardiovascular and cerebrovascular health benefits — has been stuck in a classic "rich resources, weak industry" trap. The sector has long been plagued by severe product homogenization and inefficient extraction of the plant's high-activity bioactive compounds. "Scientists bring expertise, enterprises bring real-world application scenarios, the forum brings a structured collaboration mechanism, and the government brings policy support. When these four parties work in tandem, we can turn lab breakthroughs into commercially viable products on the factory line," said Zhang Yunsheng, chairman of Yunnan Jinqi Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd.

In 2025, through the scientific achievement commercialization platform established by the Tengchong Scientists Forum, Jinqi Pharmaceuticals partnered with the research team led by Professor Li Yuhua at Northeast Forestry University, launching a joint R&D project to address the sector's core bottlenecks. Just eight months after the project was launched, the team announced major breakthroughs. They successfully identified five glycosidases with site-specific recognition capacity, built three high-efficiency whole-cell catalytic systems, and mapped out a targeted conversion process from total Panax notoginseng saponins (PNS) — the herb's core active ingredient — to high-value, high-activity rare saponins. The final product boasts a purity of over 98 percent, with a threefold increase in conversion efficiency compared to traditional methods.

Even more noteworthy is that this technology adopts a green biocatalytic process. Compared with the traditional acid-base hydrolysis method, it cuts energy consumption by 10 percent, reduces the use of organic solvents by 20 percent, and basically achieves zero waste discharge.

Such successful tech-to-market cases are multiplying rapidly across Yunnan, driven by the constantly refined commercialization framework of the high-profile Tengchong Scientists Forum.

To further grow the industry, the Tengchong Scientists Forum Industrial Park, the core commercialization hub for the forum's tech achievements, is building a key biomedicine and green food cluster in Yunnan.The 16.17 sq km park now hosts 27 enterprises, with 160,000 sqm of standard workshops already built. Its biomedicine output hit 923 million RMB in 2025, up 7.8 percent year-on-year.

Beyond hardware, the park offers full-chain enterprise support via a "one enterprise, one policy" system, with dedicated government support and full-cycle services for every resident business.