About Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences

Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences

Overview and Mandate

The Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, known in Chinese as Zhongguo Yixue Kexueyuan, is China's state-level academic centre for medical sciences. Founded in 1956 in Beijing, it has operated since 1957 under a unified management system with Peking Union Medical College, the historic medical school founded with Rockefeller Foundation support in 1917 and formally dedicated in 1921. Affiliated with the National Health Commission, the combined institution, known as CAMS and PUMC, serves simultaneously as China's highest-level medical research organisation and one of its highest-level medical education institutions, integrating medical research, teaching, clinical care and prevention.

As an information institution, CAMS and PUMC publish medical research, clinical guidance and health information from their base in Dongcheng, Beijing, through pumc.edu.cn and the channels of their institutes and hospitals. The system is large: recent descriptions count 18 to 19 research institutes (some accounts give 21), six affiliated hospitals, seven to ten colleges or schools, a graduate school and additional research and development institutions. Its flagship hospital, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, is among the most cited medical institutions in China, and the academy's publications and clinical data shape medical practice nationally, which is why it is profiled here as a national medical knowledge agency.

Historical Foundations

Peking Union Medical College was founded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1917 and formally dedicated in 1921, when its hospital also opened. The Rockefeller-backed project built a campus of 14 buildings on a 22.6-hectare site at a cost of about 7.5 million US dollars, and it introduced into China the eight-year clinical medical education programme, higher nursing education, an early residency training system and some of the country's earliest public-health practice. In 1951 the government of the People's Republic of China nationalised the college. The Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences was then founded in 1956 to function as the only state-level academic centre in medical sciences and a high-level multidisciplinary medical research institution, and from 1957 the academy and the college have been run by the same executive leadership under a unified management system.

This layered history explains the institution's character. The college brought an American-model medical school and teaching hospital; the academy brought a national research mandate on the model of a state academy of sciences. Generations of Chinese medical leaders were formed inside the combined institution — accounts of its history record that 52 academicians of the medical and health field, including Zhang Xiaoqian, Zhang Xijun, Zhong Huilan, Lin Qiaozhi and Huang Jiasui among its celebrated figures, emerged from it — and institutions across China, from disease-control bodies to major hospitals and medical universities, trace part of their founding staff to CAMS and PUMC.

Structure: Institutes, Hospitals and Colleges

The CAMS and PUMC system combines research institutes, hospitals and teaching units under one management. Recent institutional descriptions count 18 or 19 institutes — 17 biomedical institutes in earlier published accounts — covering basic medical sciences, medicinal biotechnology, medicinal plant development, laboratory animal science, hematology, dermatology, cancer, cardiovascular disease and other fields. Six hospitals are directly affiliated, together with seven colleges in recent descriptions (nine to ten schools in some current listings) and a graduate school, plus presses, pharmaceutical enterprises and off-campus research and development institutions, which numbered more than 100 in one recent account.

The workforce is correspondingly large: published profiles of the system have recorded total staff above 11,000, with dozens of academicians of the two national academies among its researchers, alongside national talent-programme scholars and chief scientists of national key laboratories and clinical research centres. Structurally, the system is designed so that a question can move from laboratory institute to clinical trial to teaching curriculum inside one organisation — a bench-to-bedside arrangement that also makes CAMS and PUMC an unusually complete source of medical information, from molecular research to hospital practice data.

Affiliated Hospitals and Clinical Care

The six affiliated hospitals are central to the institution's public identity. Peking Union Medical College Hospital, founded in 1921 and also known as Beijing Xiehe Hospital, works across two Beijing campuses — the Dongdan campus in Wangfujing, Dongcheng District, and the Xidan campus — with 53 clinical departments, more than 2,000 inpatient beds and over 10,000 outpatient visits daily in recent descriptions. It is a major national tertiary referral centre for difficult and rare cases from all over China, and in 2021 it established a National Center for International Exchange and Cooperation. The hospital merged with the former Posts and Telecommunications General Hospital in 2002, forming its Xidan base.

The other affiliated hospitals specialise by field: Fuwai Hospital for cardiovascular disease, the Cancer Hospital together with the National Cancer Center, the Plastic Surgery Hospital, the Skin Diseases Hospital in Nanjing, and the Blood Diseases Hospital in Tianjin. Together the hospitals have been described as operating about 4,301 beds with some 2.8 million outpatient visits, about 89,000 inpatients and more than 43,000 operations annually in published system accounts. Their case volumes generate the clinical research, guidelines and teaching material that flow back through the academy's journals and training programmes, linking patient care directly to its information output.

Research Programmes and Achievements

Research at CAMS and PUMC covers most fields of human disease-related research, organised through its institutes and national-level platforms, which published accounts enumerate as including national key laboratories, national clinical medicine research centres and other national research bases. The institutes' work spans basic medical sciences, pathogen biology, medicinal plants and biotechnology, laboratory animals, blood diseases, skin diseases, cancer and cardiovascular medicine. The institution's polio vaccine work is among the achievements cited in its own historical accounts, reflecting its long-standing role in preventive medicine as well as treatment.

Because the system unites institutes and hospitals, its research output includes both laboratory science and large-scale clinical evidence. Its hospitals' specialist standing — Fuwai in cardiology, the Cancer Hospital in oncology, the Blood Diseases Hospital in hematology — makes their published series and consensus statements reference material for specialists across China. The academy also carries national responsibilities in medical science planning: as the state-level academic centre, it advises the National Health Commission and represents Chinese medical science in setting research priorities, standardising practice and evaluating new technologies, functions that depend on its command of medical information across the whole system.

Education and Training

Peking Union Medical College is China's earliest medical institution to offer an eight-year medical education programme and undergraduate nursing education, and the college remains part of China's elite university groupings, listed in Project 211, Project 985 and the Double First-Class Construction. Since 2006 its medical education has been delivered in cooperation with Tsinghua University, under the name Peking Union Medical College, Tsinghua University, for the pre-medical phase. The college initiated the residency training system in China and maintains graduate and continuing education across its schools and hospitals.

Training inside CAMS and PUMC is inseparable from its research and clinical systems: medical students learn in the academy's hospitals, doctoral researchers work in its institutes, and specialist physicians train in its national centres. The institution describes its mission as leading the development of medical science and technology education in China and safeguarding people's health. Its graduates staff medical universities, research academies and leading hospitals nationwide — including institutions whose founding it directly seeded — so its curricula, textbooks and clinical standards propagate through Chinese medicine far beyond its own campuses, reinforcing its role as a national medical information authority.

Publications and Medical Information

CAMS and PUMC disseminate information through institute and hospital journals, academic presses and their web presence at pumc.edu.cn. The system has historically included medical presses and an industry group alongside its research units, and its institutes publish specialist journals in fields from basic medicine to hematology and dermatology. Peking Union Medical College Hospital's clinical publications and case literature are standard references in Chinese internal medicine, reflecting a publishing tradition that reaches back to the college's early decades.

For the wider public and profession, the institution's information role is exercised through clinical guidelines and expert consensus produced by its specialists, health information issued by its hospitals, and research news released through the academy. During national health emergencies, CAMS experts are among the authorities Chinese media turn to first, and the academy's institutes supply laboratory and epidemiological expertise to the national response system. In the terms of this directory, CAMS and PUMC function as China's apex medical knowledge agency: they generate a large share of the country's most advanced medical evidence and operate the channels — journals, guidelines, teaching and expert advice — through which that evidence reaches practice.

International Cooperation

The institution maintains cooperative relationships in scientific research, education and medical practice with medical colleges and research institutions in more than 240 countries and regions in its own published descriptions, including close ties with Yale University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, Oxford University, Heidelberg University, the Karolinska Institute and the US National Institutes of Health. It opens research facilities to the international science community and supports joint training of young scientists and graduate students, continuing a pattern set by the Rockefeller Foundation origins of the college.

International exchange also flows through its hospitals: Peking Union Medical College Hospital's National Center for International Exchange and Cooperation, established in 2021, was created to make the hospital a substantive player in the global medical system. CAMS and PUMC researchers publish extensively in international journals, and the system's Nature Index presence through units such as the Cancer Institute and Hospital reflects that output. For foreign medical institutions, the academy is the natural counterpart organisation in China, and its English-language materials are a primary source for understanding Chinese academic medicine.

Leadership, Governance and Role

CAMS and PUMC are administered by the National Health Commission, the State Council's health administration department, and operate under the integrated management system in place since 1957, in which the same executives lead the academy and the college. The system's headquarters are at 9 Dong Dan San Tiao in Dongcheng, Beijing. Its standing is formal as well as practical: the college is the only university directly under the national health administration in historical descriptions of the system, and the academy is defined in its own accounts as the state-level academic centre for medical sciences.

Profiled as an information agency, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences is the point at which China's medical research, elite clinical care and medical education converge. Its institutes produce evidence, its hospitals test and apply it at national scale, its college trains the profession that uses it, and its publications and experts communicate it to government and public. Few countries concentrate those functions in a single institution to this degree, which is why CAMS and PUMC occupy a unique place in this directory's coverage of China's knowledge institutions.