(Yicai Global) Feb. 9 -- The Human Genetics Resources Administration of China under the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) has decided to revoke the administrative license it had granted to two human genetic resources projects, state media The Paper has learned from the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The two canceled projects are an international research project Shanghai Jiaotong University is conducting in cooperation with the University of California, Los Angeles, titled Study on the Genetic Alignment of Serious Mental Illness in Chinese Han Population, and an international research project by Peking University in collaboration with the University of Oxford, titled Study on the Causes and Genetic Basis of Major Depression among Chinese Women.

The Ministry of Science and Technology of China required that upon receipt of the decision of revocation, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Peking University immediately cease related international cooperative research, recover all human genetic resources and related research data in the international cooperative research of the projects, and hand in the administrative licenses they were previously granted within five working days.

The referenced 'human genetic resources' refers to organs, tissues, cells, blood, preparations, recombinant DNA constructs and other genetic materials containing the human genome, genes and their products, and related information.

In Aug. 2017, ThePaper.cn interviewed the relevant person in charge of Shanghai Jiaotong University on the major depression project, one of the above projects. Cooperating with 60 to 70 hospitals in China, the major depression project planned to collect the blood samples of more than female 20,000 Han Chinese patients with major depressive disorder within five years and form a sample library with 40,000 to 50,000 samples in combination with the normal control group. This was to be by far the world's largest study of depression genetics, Li Weidong, the executive of the major depression project and vice president of the Office of Research Management and Bio-X Institutes of Shanghai Jiaotong University, explained in an interview with The Paper.

It is worth noting that well-known British psychiatrist and geneticist Jonathan Flint, who is also a professor at UCLA's Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science, worked in China under a program called One Thousand Professors Shanghai Jiaotong University started to attract international professors.

Biology preprint website bioRxiv and Science data published an article each, both of which were based on Chinese genome database and analyzed genetic and evolution characteristics of Chinese people last February and July. However, Chinese scholars were not among the main researchers or even authors of the two articles. This circumstance triggered heated discussions among Chinese scientists at home and elsewhere about how and why data on Chinese genetic resources had been leaked abroad.

Oxford, Virginia Commonwealth University and over 50 Chinese hospitals established the China Oxford and VCU Experimental Research on Genetic Epidemiology (CONVERGE) in early 2015. This was an international alliance for Chinese genetic data, with a research base in Huashan Hospital, Fudan University. At the time, Jonathan Flint was a professor at Oxford and one of four main experts in CONVERGE.

The project obtained the entire genome of 5,303 major depressive disorder patients and the whole genome of 5,337 members in the control group from the psychiatry departments of 58 provincial mental health centers or general hospitals in 45 cities from 23 provinces, making it the largest genome research project covering the whole Han Chinese population.

Researchers such as Flint chose to conduct the research in China not only because it has massive numbers of undiagnosed depressive disorder patients, but also because it is hard to access such data in European and American countries.