International medical experts converged on the southern Chinese city of Changsha at the weekend for the inaugural International Congress of Advanced Medical Engineering. Among the guests was prof. TEOH SWEE HIN, a leading researcher in bone regeneration technology. He told CGTN reporter Lu Sirui that medical innovation requires clinicians and engineers to work together. 

LU SIRUI CGTN Reporter "So Prof Teoh, you've achieved a significant professional success in Singapore and being recognized as one of the most influential scientists there. So, what motivated you to come to China and to teach in Hunan University?"

TEOH SWEE HIN Professor, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Hunan University "Teaching is a calling. I love to teach. That is the number one. I have supervised more than 37 PHD students, quite a number of them are in China. And one of them has been inviting me to Hunan University for a number of years. And Hunan University has given me a lot of resources, very good students. That one of them is a clinician, which I like very much to train clinicians to do good PhD work."

LU SIRUI CGTN Reporter "So what are your observations of China's medical research commercialization? And what is the biggest challenge for Chinese researchers to translate their ideas into real products?"

TEOH SWEE HIN Professor, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Hunan University "What is lacking in China is also lacking in the whole of Asia. That is we work in silos. We do not work openly with different groups. It but yet we must understand that the creativity of our mind involves different discipline to get new innovation. So, China would have to remember you are good at manufacturing right now. But someone, some countries like Vietnam will take over, and you have to keep on innovating. You need to have creativity. That creativity means that you need to have interdisciplinary activities. Clinicians and engineers work together will lead to translation breakthrough. With Enterprise the costs of health care should come down. But now it is going up and up and up. And we don't understand why, because we did not go back to realize that we did not have a good clinician, engineering academy. Well known, the only way to bring down price is competition, good, clean competition with many enterprise."