About Guangzhou Laboratory

Guangzhou Laboratory

The Guangzhou Laboratory, also referred to as the Guangzhou National Laboratory, is a national laboratory in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China. It is located on Guangzhou International Bio Island and is directed by the respiratory medicine academician Zhong Nanshan, recipient of the Medal of the Republic. The laboratory focuses on respiratory diseases and on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of major respiratory infectious diseases, building on Guangzhou's State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Disease and its national respiratory medicine centres. In June 2025 the laboratory announced that onradivir, described as the world's first PB2-subunit inhibitor for influenza A and developed with its partners, had received approval from China's National Medical Products Administration, with phase III results published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

Bio Island setting

Guangzhou International Bio Island, in the Huangpu District area of the city's biomedical development, is planned as a life-science cooperation zone for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and a world-class biomedicine research and development centre. The island's development plan for the 14th Five-Year Plan period, covering 2021 to 2025, set goals that included striving to build a national laboratory for respiratory diseases and forming a biomedicine and biosecurity research cluster. The Guangzhou Laboratory is that national laboratory, the flagship research institution of the island's strategy. Its neighbours in Guangzhou's biomedical geography include the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Guangzhou Medical University's respiratory institutions, the partners from which its founding scientific base was drawn. Construction on the island continues around it, including the Human Cell Lineage Atlas Facility, a major national infrastructure project that began construction there in March 2025.

Direction by Zhong Nanshan

The laboratory's director, Zhong Nanshan, is China's best-known respiratory physician. Born in October 1936 in Nanjing into a medical family, he was admitted to Peking University Health Science Center in 1955, joined the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University at thirty-five, and helped build its chronic bronchitis research group, whose work was recognised at the 1978 national science conference; the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Disease was founded on that base in 1979, the year Zhong left for further study in the United Kingdom. He became president of the hospital, was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 1996, led China's clinical response thinking during the 2003 SARS outbreak, when his team's treatment protocol substantially lowered mortality, and in January 2020 travelled to Wuhan as head of the National Health Commission's high-level expert group on COVID-19, receiving the Medal of the Republic in September 2020. At the Guangzhou Laboratory he holds the directorship as director of the national laboratory alongside his roles at the National Clinical Research Center for Respiratory Diseases and the State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Disease, giving the young laboratory a founder whose authority in respiratory medicine is unrivalled in China.

Scientific foundations

The laboratory was not built from nothing. Guangzhou's respiratory research establishment, which it extends to national-laboratory scale, includes the State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Disease, established in 2007 through a collaboration between the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health and the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, described as China's only state key laboratory dedicated to respiratory health, founded by Zhong and working at the intersection of basic research and clinical application on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of respiratory diseases. Around it stand the National Respiratory Medicine Center and the National Clinical Research Center for Respiratory Diseases at Guangzhou Medical University's First Affiliated Hospital. The Guangzhou Laboratory draws these institutions' people, platforms and clinical access into a national mission, in a city whose region, Guangdong, has repeatedly been the first Chinese ground for emerging respiratory outbreaks, from SARS in 2003 to the influenza threats its researchers track.

Research focus: respiratory disease

The laboratory's focus is respiratory disease in its full range: major respiratory infectious diseases, where prevention and rapid response dominate, and the diagnosis and treatment questions that follow patients from first infection to recovery. Its institutional descriptions emphasise the prevention, diagnosis and treatment chain, the same chain along which Zhong's own career was built, from pathogen identification and transmission judgement in an outbreak's first days to treatment protocols that lower mortality. Guangzhou's respiratory establishment adds chronic disease depth through its state key laboratory's work on conditions such as chronic bronchitis and chronic obstructive disease, the field in which Zhong's original research group won national recognition in 1978. A national laboratory at Bio Island is expected to bind these strengths, outbreak science and chronic respiratory medicine, into shared platforms for pathogen research, drug development and clinical trials.

Onradivir: a first-in-class influenza drug

The laboratory's defining public achievement to date is onradivir. On 10 June 2025, at a press conference held by the Guangzhou National Laboratory, Zhong Nanshan announced that onradivir, the world's first inhibitor of the PB2 subunit of the influenza A virus polymerase to reach approval, had received National Medical Products Administration approval on 20 May 2025, with its pivotal phase III results published simultaneously in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. Representatives of Guangzhou Medical University's First Affiliated Hospital, the National Respiratory Medicine Center, the National Clinical Research Center for Respiratory Diseases, the developer Zhongsheng Ruichuang Biotech and the trial's biostatistics partner attended. The drug, also known as ZSP1273, attacks the PB2 subunit that the viral polymerase uses to begin copying its genome, a mechanism distinct from the neuraminidase inhibition of oseltamivir, the standard treatment against which onradivir was tested. Phase II findings, also published in The Lancet journals, had already shown that a 600 milligram regimen begun within forty-eight hours of symptom onset could expedite recovery.

The phase III trial evidence

The phase III trial, registered as NCT04683406 and reported with Zifeng Yang as a lead author and Zhong Nanshan among its authors, was a multicentre, double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled and oseltamivir-controlled study conducted at sixty-eight clinical sites in China. Between May 2022 and May 2023 it screened 943 patients and randomised 750 adults aged eighteen to sixty-four with influenza-like illness, positive rapid influenza A antigen tests, fever and at least one moderate systemic and one moderate respiratory symptom within forty-eight hours of onset, to 600 milligrams of onradivir once daily, 75 milligrams of oseltamivir twice daily, or placebo. The median time to alleviation of symptoms was 38.83 hours on onradivir against 63.35 hours on placebo, a difference of about twenty-four and a half hours, and comparable to oseltamivir's 42.17 hours, leading the authors to conclude that onradivir has similar curative efficacy to oseltamivir with an acceptable safety profile. For the Guangzhou Laboratory, the trial demonstrated the full chain it exists to provide: a Guangzhou-developed antiviral, tested through Guangzhou-led national respiratory centres, published in a leading international journal and approved by the national regulator.

Why influenza innovation matters

The laboratory and its partners framed onradivir against a large and growing burden: China's anti-influenza market exceeded ten billion renminbi in 2023 and was projected to reach 22.4 billion renminbi by 2027, in reporting around the approval. Seasonal influenza returns every year, pandemic influenza remains a standing threat, and existing drug classes face resistance concerns, so a new mechanism of action has value beyond a single product: PB2 inhibition gives clinicians and stockpile planners an additional class if neuraminidase inhibitors fail against a future strain. A national respiratory laboratory that delivers a first-in-class drug within its first years answers the question every new Chinese national laboratory faces, what its platforms produce that existing institutes did not, with a concrete, regulator-approved result.

Collaboration model

Onradivir also displays the laboratory's collaboration model. The announcement joined the laboratory, the university hospital, two national respiratory centres, a biotechnology company developer and a specialist clinical-research organisation responsible for biostatistics, whose team executed the statistical analyses, figures and responses to journal editorial queries. That pattern echoes Guangzhou respiratory research's earlier international collaborations, such as the five-year, 115 million dollar initiative between Harvard Medical School and the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health announced in 2020 to address SARS-CoV-2 biology, detection and therapies, led on the Chinese side by Zhong and his Guangzhou colleagues. The laboratory operates as the hub of such consortia, setting direction and lending national standing while hospitals supply patients, companies supply development capacity and partners supply specialist methods.

Place in China's national laboratory system

National laboratories are the top tier of China's research system, and a respiratory national laboratory in Guangzhou recognises both the city's scientific record and Guangdong's front-line exposure to emerging infections. The Bio Island plan's ambition to build the laboratory alongside a biomedicine and biosecurity cluster frames its wider role in preparedness: pathogen science, antiviral pipelines and clinical trial networks maintained between outbreaks, so that the response Zhong had to improvise in 2003 and 2020 can in future start from standing infrastructure. The laboratory's association with the State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Disease, China's only such laboratory in the field, and with national clinical centres gives it a claim to permanence that a purely new institution would lack.

Outlook

The Guangzhou Laboratory's outlook will be judged by whether onradivir is a first product or a singular one. Its assets are formidable: a director of national standing, the country's deepest respiratory clinical research base, a Bio Island campus still adding national facilities, and a demonstrated ability to carry a drug from mechanism to approval and Lancet publication. Its field guarantees continued relevance, since respiratory infection, from seasonal influenza to novel coronaviruses, remains among the most consequential threats to public health in China and worldwide. If the laboratory sustains a pipeline across prevention, diagnosis and treatment as its mission describes, it will have fulfilled the Bio Island plan's central promise: a national laboratory for respiratory diseases, in the city where China's modern respiratory medicine was built.