A corporation with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party and a history of industrial espionage produces hardware used for sensitive medical research funded by the National Institutes of Health, a Washington Examiner review has found.
United Imaging is a multinational medical technology company based in Shanghai that has conducted research alongside the Chinese military and cooperates with the state-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences. In addition to its government links, three United Imaging employees were charged in 2013 with transferring “nonpublic information” generated at an NIH-funded lab to both the company and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in exchange for payments.
Despite United Imaging’s history and despite evidence that some Chinese hardware has backdoors allowing data to be remotely downloaded, public records show that the company’s hardware is present at NIH-funded labs and major research installations across the country.
REPUBLICANS ARE PUSHING THESE FIVE DEMOCRATS TO FLIP ON FUNDING BILL
The Center for Quantitative Cancer Imaging at the University of Utah, for instance, had multiple United Imaging PET scanners installed in its clinical research lab as of September 2023, per a press release. Mass General Brigham, a Harvard-affiliated hospital that serves as one of the nation’s leading biomedical research organizations, similarly, used an NIH grant to purchase hardware manufactured by United Imaging.
Illustrating how widespread the use of these machines is, a search of Google Scholar — a popular repository for academic work — turns up thousands of research articles mentioning United Imaging or uEXPLORER, its flagship PET scanner. The research, some of which occurred in NIH-funded labs, often notes that hardware manufactured by United Imaging was used in the course of research.
The development of uEXPLORER was itself a joint venture between the University of California, Davis, supported by NIH funding.
United Imaging’s ties to China are not particularly obscure.
In 2020, the state-run newspaper China Daily reported that United Imaging had received a government award recognizing its research alongside the People’s Liberation Army General Hospital as well as the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences. United Imaging has a joint research and development presence in Wuhan alongside the Chinese Academy of Sciences and has collaborated with the academy in developing its hardware.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences operates under the State Council, the “executive body of the supreme organ of state power” in China, and is led by CCP member Hou Jianguo.
Jianguo wrote in 2020, shortly after being selected as the organization’s president, that it “will be guided by [Chinese President] Xi Jinping’s thoughts on socialism with Chinese characteristics for [a] new era.”
Beyond mere presence in NIH-funded labs, the research agency has also provided funding that has helped United Imaging develop new technology. United Imaging, alongside Yale University and UC Davis, for instance, received nearly $10 million from the NIH to develop new PET scan technology in September 2020.
Critics of China are often quick to point to the country’s national security laws, which could be leveraged by the CCP to demand sensitive data from companies like United Imaging.
China’s desire to acquire American data isn’t merely a hypothetical concern. Reports have found that state-sponsored hackers go to great lengths to steal Western medical data, according to Wired. Clinical trial data, information related to cancer research, and medical device intellectual property are among the most common targets of these hackers. One such attack saw 4.5 million patient records stolen.
U.S. authorities are taking these threats seriously.
The FDA, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the American Hospital Association have all expressed concerns about the proliferation of Chinese-made medical devices in the United States. Such concerns were heightened after a common Chinese medical monitor model was found to have a backdoor “allowing the device to download and execute unverified remote files,” per CISA.
DOZENS OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES MAINTAIN PARTNERSHIPS WITH CHINESE MILITARY-LINKED ENTITIES
The Senate recently passed the Biosecure Act, which would enable the White House to ban federal contracting with “biotechnology companies of concern” in an effort to protect American health or genetic data from falling into the hands of the CCP. The House has yet to vote on the legislation.
United Imaging and the NIH did not respond to requests for comment.