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The research team led by Professor Ma Lixin from the School of Life Sciences at Hubei University has been awarded the Gold Medal with the Congratulations of the Jury at the 51st International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva. Their pioneering invention, “Novel Programmable Argonaute Nucleases”, stood out from over 1,400 top inventions worldwide, marking a historic breakthrough for the university at this renowned international event.

Founded in 1973 and jointly organized by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the Swiss Federal Government, the International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva is one of the largest and most renowned invention events globally, widely recognized as the “Olympics of Inventions.” This year, the Chinese delegation presented 237 projects, reaching its largest scale in history. The selection process for the Gold Medal with Congratulations of the Jury is exceptionally rigorous. Unlike other awards, it is not open for direct application. Instead, candidates must undergo a secondary selection from all gold medal-winning projects by an international panel of 153 interdisciplinary experts, and the award is only granted upon a unanimous vote by all jury members. Conferred upon less than 3% of all gold medalists, it is hailed as the “Gold among Golds”, representing the highest standard of invention and innovation on the global stage.

Moving forward, Hubei University will continue to deepen collaborative innovation across industry, academia, and research. By focusing on achieving breakthroughs in technology bottlenecks in foundational tools of synthetic biology, the university aims to further ignite the original innovation vitality of scientific talent and promote the deep integration of the “core enzyme resources - key technologies - industrial applications” chain and accelerate the commercialization and application of scientific and technological achievements in precision medicine and biomanufacturing. Through these efforts, it strives to secure more breakthroughs in fields such as high-end biological reagents and intelligent biomanufacturing.