About Haihe Laboratory of Cell Ecology

Haihe Laboratory of Cell Ecology

The Haihe Laboratory of Cell Ecology is a municipal research laboratory of Tianjin, in northern China, studying the cell ecosystem — how blood and other cells interact with their microenvironment — in support of haematology, stem-cell and regenerative-medicine research. It is based at 10 Yuexin Road in the Binhai High-Tech Zone of Tianjin. One of the first five Haihe Laboratories approved by the Tianjin municipal government, it is run by the Institute of Hematology and Blood Diseases Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, and its director is the academician Liu Depei. The laboratory is also known in English-language materials as the Haihe Laboratory of Cell Ecosystem.

Founding and inauguration

The laboratory was officially inaugurated on 16 November 2021, according to its deputy director Sha Hao in a later account of its work, as one of the Haihe Laboratories established in Tianjin with the support of the Tianjin municipal government. It builds, in Sha's description, on the foundational stem-cell research of the Institute of Hematology and Blood Diseases Hospital. Its registered status is confirmed in industry descriptions: it is one of the five registered Haihe Laboratories approved by the Tianjin Municipal People's Government. The laboratory's stated goal is to promote population health through the cell ecosystem, developing technological frontiers and advancing research, innovation and development in its field for the benefit of people's health.

The Haihe system and the host institute

The Haihe Laboratories are Tianjin's provincial-level flagship system, benchmarked against national laboratories, with the first five covering materials green creation and manufacturing, advanced computing and key software, synthetic biology, modern Chinese medicine and cell ecology. The cell ecology laboratory's lead construction unit is the Institute of Hematology and Blood Diseases Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences — China's national centre for blood-disease research, based in Tianjin at 288 Nanjing Road. The institute carries the State Key Laboratory of Experimental Hematology and the National Clinical Research Center for Blood Diseases, and its researchers' work regularly appears among China's top annual haematology advances. Building the municipal laboratory on this institute gave Tianjin's cell-ecology direction an immediate national-grade clinical and research base in blood science.

Director Liu Depei

The laboratory's director, Liu Depei, is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. His biographical record documents a career at the top of Chinese medical science administration and research: he is a former president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and of Peking Union Medical College, and a former vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. In 2008 he was elected a member of the United States Institute of Medicine and of the World Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 to the European Academy of Sciences. He served as a member of the standing committees of the Eleventh and Twelfth National People's Congresses and of the State Council's degree committee, led national consulting work on population and health science-and-technology planning, infectious-disease prevention strategy and medical talent development, and originated China's scientific data sharing in the population and health fields, leading the team that built the national population and health scientific data sharing service platform approved in 2011. His own research spans molecular biology and cardiovascular and genetic medicine. For a laboratory whose subject is the cellular basis of health and disease, his appointment joined laboratory direction to national-level experience in both research and health policy.

The cell ecosystem idea

The laboratory's defining concept is the cell ecosystem: cells do not act alone but live in microenvironments — niches — whose signals shape their behaviour, and disease can be understood as an ecological imbalance in that system. Its documented programme is structured in five key areas: the cellular ecosystem itself; cellular ecology and immunity; cellular ecological imbalance and major diseases; cellular ecological reconstruction; and frontier technologies for cellular ecological research. That sequence is a research strategy in miniature: describe the system, understand its immune dimension, explain how its imbalance produces major disease, learn to rebuild it — the scientific basis of stem-cell and regenerative therapy — and develop the frontier tools the whole programme needs.

Three platforms

In Sha Hao's account, the laboratory's work is centred on three platforms. A Frontier Technology Center drives original innovation, in the formulation used across Chinese science policy, "from 0 to 1". A Clinical Translation Platform focuses on full-cycle development pipelines for four key products — taking candidate cell and gene therapies through the development chain rather than leaving them as papers. An Innovation Synergy Platform collaborates with clinical institutions, research organisations and enterprises to advance cellular and gene therapy products jointly. The laboratory focuses, in the same account, on tackling key challenges in cellular and gene therapy, emphasising product development and technological innovation.

How projects and translation are supported

The laboratory operates a flexible review system for project selection, talent recruitment, patent applications and research translation, with project proposals aligned to its mission and supported by funding from the Tianjin municipal government. It has established, with municipal support, a fast-track patent approval process intended to reduce significantly the time and cost of research translation. It also operates 15 incubation platforms, each of approximately 150 square metres, to support start-ups and internal projects with streamlined registration. Those mechanisms matter for cell and gene therapy, where the distance between a laboratory result and a regulated clinical product is long and expensive, and where a municipal laboratory's value lies partly in shortening it.

Industry collaboration: the EdiGene partnership

The laboratory's translation model is documented in practice by its strategic research and development collaboration with EdiGene, a clinical-stage biotechnology company working on genome-editing therapies, announced in January 2022. EdiGene described the laboratory, run by the Institute of Hematology and Blood Diseases Hospital, as focused on fundamental research, innovation and translation in the cell ecosystem, and the collaboration concerned haematopoietic stem-cell regenerative therapies and platform technologies. EdiGene's own lead programme, ET-01, a gene-editing haematopoietic stem-cell therapy for transfusion-dependent beta-thalassaemia, had received Chinese regulatory approval for clinical trial in 2021 and dosed its first patient at the host institute in Tianjin — the clinical environment into which the laboratory's stem-cell work is plugged.

People

Beyond its director, the laboratory's public record names Sha Hao, assistant director of the Institute of Hematology and Blood Diseases Hospital, as a deputy director of the laboratory who has presented its platform structure and review mechanisms to the haematology community, including at the 2025 annual meeting of the Chinese Alliance for Societies of Hematology in Tianjin. That presentation itself shows the laboratory's intended audience: China's practising haematology research community, for whom cell and gene therapy project review and translation strategy are live professional questions.

Tianjin setting

The laboratory's address at 10 Yuexin Road places it in the Binhai High-Tech Zone, part of Tianjin's Binhai New Area, the city's coastal platform for advanced industry. Tianjin is one of China's four direct-controlled municipalities and, with Beijing and Hebei, forms the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region the Haihe system was built to serve. The host institute's main site is in the city's Heping District, so the laboratory links a historic national medical institute to a new high-technology zone — the geography of translation, from established clinical science to the spaces where products and companies are incubated.

Significance

The Haihe Laboratory of Cell Ecology is the life-and-health through-line of Tianjin's laboratory programme in its most literal form: a municipal laboratory whose subject is the ecosystem of cells itself. Its significance rests on documented features rather than claims — an academician director with national medical-science leadership experience; a host institute that is China's national blood-diseases centre; a five-area research programme running from ecosystem description to reconstruction; three platforms spanning frontier innovation, product pipelines and synergy; municipal fast-track patenting and 15 incubation spaces; and a recorded industry collaboration in gene-editing stem-cell therapy. Together they describe a laboratory built not only to study the cell ecosystem, but to move what it learns toward patients.