As we welcome the new year, on behalf of the leadership team of China National Center for Bioinformation (CNCB), I extend my most sincere greetings to every staff member and graduate students who have dedicated themselves with diligence and commitment over the past year. We also express our deepest gratitude and highest respect to leaders at all levels and friends from all sectors for their unwavering support to CNCB.
In 2025, we established “seizing the commanding heights of bioinformation technology” as a core strategic mission, deeply integrating it into CNCB’s comprehensive reform, development, and scientific innovation efforts. We actively guided researchers to align personal aspirations with the national’s development goals, ensuring their research directions resonate with CNCB’s core responsibilities and primary tasks. Centered on national strategic needs and the broader trends of scientific advancement, we are formulating the CNCB 15th Five-Year Strategic Plan. This plan clearly sets forth the overarching goal of building an innovation hub for “AI + Life Sciences”, defines three key priority areas and three frontier layouts, and charts a clear, scientific pathway for CNCB to achieve an intelligent leapfrog development in the coming period.
During this critical phase of transition, we took the lead in implementing a precise resource allocation model characterized by “strategy-driven, category-specific policies”, significantly enhancing our capacity to concentrate and guarantee resources for major research initiatives and key core domains. We vigorously advanced institutional transformation and capability building within our talent teams, refined mechanism for cultivating and selecting young cadres, and appointed outstanding young leaders who demonstrate professional excellence. Innovatively, we launched distinctive talent programs such as "Guoxin Researcher", "Guoxin Young Scholar", and "Guoxin Award", supplemented by differentiated support measures including "Category A Self-deployment Projects". By striving to dismantle institutional barriers that hinder talent development, we have initially established a systematic scientific and technological innovation model-driven by major tasks, oriented toward innovative value, and integrated across the entire chain-effectively stimulating the overall efficiency of our innovation system.
In 2025, we focused our efforts on the efficient advancement of major facility construction. The CNCB facility project successfully achieved single-unit completion, while simultaneously accelerating the implementation of the Academy's supporting Class A Pioneer Special Projects and Cyberspace Information Special Projects. These efforts have established critical capabilities to ensure China’s biological data supply chain, laying a solid foundation for unlocking the value of data elements.
As the core of the national biological data center system, CNCB has been deeply involved in the planning and construction of all system nodes. Significant progress has been made in stabilizing core database services, upgrading human genetic resource data management technologies, and developing an integrated portal with an intelligent cloud platform. An independent and controllable computing and application ecosystem has begun to take shape.
To address “bottleneck” challenges in bioinformation, we assisted the National Health Commission in conducting a special survey on Chinese population cohort and took the lead in undertaking the platform construction for this initiative. Moving forward, CNCB will fully commit to tackling these key challenges and establishing an integrated data platform, thereby providing a core data foundation for life science research and the development of precision medicine.
Through proactive planning and forward-looking layout, we actively pursued and undertook national strategic platforms and major scientific research tasks, securing 41 new vertical projects throughout the year. We continued to enrich the bioinformatics resource system, which now comprises over 110 databases across 9 categories, with the total volume of the integrated data exceeding 93PB. This system has supported the output of nearly 6,000 scientific research achievements. In international data services and cooperation, CNCB has maintained the stable operation of global biological data submission services, managed data submission for national major scientific research projects-serving a total of 43 special programs, and provided crucial data support and service guarantees for the implementation of national science and technology plans.
In 2025, we actively expanded bilateral and multilateral international cooperation. The international alliance BHBD, led by CNCB, has grown to include 37 institutions from 18 countries. We signed new cooperation memoranda with 6 institutions from 5 countries and joined the Global Biodata Coalition (GBC), significantly enhancing Chinese participation and influence in international biodata governance.
The new journey ahead is one filled with glory and dreams. It is great precisely because it is challenging; it shines all the core brightly because it demands perseverance. In the coming year, we will remain true to our original aspirations and mission, embracing the pioneering spirit of innovation, the perseverance that wears away stone, and an even more vigorous drive. Together, we will strive to write a brilliant new chapter in the high-quality development of CNCB and march courageously toward the vast starry sea of building a leading nation in science and technology!
Finally, I sincerely wish everyone good health, continuous professional growth, family happiness, and all the best in the new year!
