Chinese startup among winners of G20 Innovation League competition

Chinese startup Sansure Biotech on Sunday won the award for healthcare innovation at the G20 Innovation League, a competition between 100 startups from over 20 countries.

Held both in presence and online over the weekend in the southern Italy's city of Sorrento, the competition saw five groups of twenty startups proposing innovative products and solutions in five different competitive sessions, each concerning one of the five main challenges currently faced by mankind: Cleantech, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things and Wearables, Smart Cities and Mobility, and Healthcare.

Conceived under the auspices of the G20 Italian presidency and organized by Italy's Foreign Affairs Ministry and the Italian Trade Agency (ITA) in collaboration with Italian National Innovation Fund and SIMEST, an Italian business internationalization company, the event was aimed at building a bridge of cooperation between public and private innovation players, startups and investors, featuring 100 venture capitalists (VCs) from various countries.

Opening the competition, Italy's Minister of Foreign Affairs Luigi Di Maio highlighted in a speech the importance of international cooperation in addressing current global challenges and rethinking the future in an innovative way, urging global players to "join forces to shape together a global innovation agenda for the post-COVID world."

"The experience in this forum will be fundamental for a global recovery that will be truly sustainable featuring innovation," he said.

Following the competitive sessions, final votes by G20 member-nominated VCs and investors determined 10 winners -- two per category -- selected as examples of immediate opportunities to tackle global challenges and boost global investment and trade.

China's Sansure Biotech, a startup specialized in reagents and advanced testing tools widely used in battling the COVID-19 pandemic around the world, grabbed the healthcare award, introducing, among other products, its Advance Magnetic Beads Technology, which relies on super paramagnetic nano-spheres to absorb DNA/RNA, increasing screening processes speed and effectiveness.

In the same contest, Indonesian startup Nalagenetics was also awarded, while winners in the other categories included startups from Russia, Indonesia, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Canada and Italy.

"I think China is the most aggressive country in building startups, not only within the country but also spreading around the world, so we learn from China because many solutions have been made by startups and big companies from China," Bonifasius W. Pudjianto, director for ICT Empowerment at the Indonesian Ministry of Communications and Informatics, told Xinhua.

After the winners' announcement, the event was handed over to Indonesia. The country will host the second edition of the G20 Innovation League in 2022, as it holds the next rotating G20 presidency.