From China's Global Times, June 15:
- Gates Foundation to donate $50m to partnership in China amid Microsoft co-founder’s visit
- US firms, organizations boost Chinese ties, despite diplomatic tension
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Thursday announced that it has renewed collaboration with the Beijing Municipal Government and Tsinghua University on innovative therapies for infectious diseases prevalent in low- and middle-income countries, pledging a donation of $50 million for the joint endeavor.
The announcement was made as Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, visits China for the first since 2019. In a speech on Thursday, Gates highlighted Chinese innovators' "important role" and China's "invaluable experience" in tackling issues such as health and poverty reduction.
"It's been a long time since I was in China - four years. The world looked very different then," Gates said in a speech delivered at the Global Health Drug Discovery Institute (GHDDI) in Beijing, pointing to rising challenges facing the world. "The need to meaningfully address these challenges has never been more urgent," Gates said, according to a transcript of his speech shared with the Global Times on Thursday.
The GHDDI was jointly founded by the Gates Foundation, Tsinghua University and the Beijing Municipal Government in 2016. It is an independent and not-for-profit research organization, the first of its kind in China, aiming to improve global health through the accelerated development of new drugs and innovative technologies to tackle diseases that disproportionately affect populations in the developing world.
To bolster the GHDDI's drug discovery capacity, the Gates Foundation will provide US$50 million to the institute, which will be matched by the Beijing Municipal Government, the foundation said in a press release sent to the Global Times on Thursday.
Tsinghua University will also continue to support the GHDDI in areas such as building and sharing research platforms, translating research discoveries and developing talent, the press release said.....
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