Inspired by 'The浪潮之巅', Maijing Builds a Living AI-Powered TCM Brain and Files IPO Prospectus
“A major technological trend does not emerge from short-term fluctuations, but rather through a long-term, sustained process that typically lasts at least a decade or even longer. There is no need to rush to enter the market a day earlier or later; for a wave that spans ten to several decades, finding your position and taking action in the first or fifth year is still timely.”
If you have read *On the Crest of the Wave*, you are likely familiar with its author, Wu Jun. In fact, compared to this book on entrepreneurship, a technological paradigm proposed by Wu Jun is more worthy of careful contemplation for its deeper implications: “Existing Industries + New Technologies = New Industries.”
The integration of existing industries with new technologies gives rise to emerging industries, where such new technologies may include big data, artificial intelligence, and new energy sources. The combination of traditional industries with computer and internet technologies constitutes the paradigm of the Third Industrial Revolution. Over the past 50 years, the application of electronic computers and internet technologies has significantly influenced the rise and fall of numerous industries. Moore’s Law has further amplified the impact of this transformation, even directly contributing to the decline and resurgence of industry leaders such as IBM. However, while Moore’s Law continues to exert influence, it is gradually encountering bottlenecks and diminishing effectiveness. At this juncture, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and related technologies are increasingly recognized as the driving forces behind the next industrial revolution.
The paradigm shift in social industries driven by technological revolution inspires forward-thinking practitioners in the tech sector. The end of Moore’s Law and the advancement of artificial intelligence are ushering in a new era—the “Algorithm-as-Chip” era: identifying the right problems, targeting the appropriate scenarios, applying suitable algorithms, and customizing “chips” accordingly. In China, MACROCURA, an AI-driven Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) enterprise, has leveraged this technological paradigm to become one of the few players in the domestic medical innovation industry that focuses its R&D and innovation efforts on foundational TCM AI technologies and intelligent algorithms tailored for TCM scenarios.
“The integration of China’s most traditional TCM industry with the latest emerging artificial intelligence technologies can enable exponential, compounding advancements in TCM,” said Ma Jun’ang, CEO of MACROCURA.
Having determined his direction, Ma Jun’ang did not act immediately. He noted that although the concept of AI was proposed as early as the 1950s, and attempts to apply AI to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) emerged more than three decades ago, technological implementation and commercial application remained extremely difficult due to immature hardware conditions—such as computer integrated circuit chips—and prohibitively high data processing costs. In the following years, he continued his original business to accumulate capital, while quietly monitoring the development of the AI industry, awaiting the right opportunity to enter the market.
The opportunity emerged in 2016. AlphaGo defeated top human Go players, marking a new height for machine intelligence, as AI applications continued to expand into an increasing number of fields. MACROCURA was founded in response to this trend.
The development and rise of an enterprise cannot be achieved by relying solely on strong leadership. A stable team is a crucial force supporting the company’s upward growth.
MACROCURA’s core management and technical teams all have backgrounds at well-known domestic and international enterprises. Ma Jun’ang is a successful entrepreneur who has developed his own corporate management system through multiple successful entrepreneurial ventures, and he has 21 years of experience serving as a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and as a deputy to the People’s Congress.
Fan Wenli, Vice President of MACROCURA, earned his bachelor’s degree in Physics from Peking University before pursuing advanced studies abroad, where he obtained a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and an MBA from CEIBS. With extensive experience at Fortune 500 companies such as Bosch Group and Carl Zeiss, he oversees the overall strategic direction of MACROCURA’s product development and R&D initiatives.
Su Qiang, Chief Medical Officer of MACROCURA, completed his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral studies at Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine before serving as the Director of the Traditional Chinese Medicine Department at a major Grade 3A hospital. In 2019, he presented MACROCURA’s entrepreneurial vision to Wan Exiang, Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, elucidating how the company leverages modern technology to inject new vitality into traditional Chinese medicine.
Ma Jun’ang stated, “MACROCURA is not a pure technology company; it has a foundation in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and addresses issues in TCM diagnosis and treatment. Therefore, the professional and educational backgrounds of the MACROCURA team have played a significant role in the deployment of its underlying technologies.”
If we adhere to a binary framework, healthcare innovation companies would be simplistically categorized as either technology- or service-oriented, or as asset-light versus asset-heavy enterprises. However, it is evident that such definitions are inaccurate. In Ma Jun’ang’s view, unlike industry players that develop hardware such as TCM four-diagnostic instruments or offer solutions for digitizing paper records (for instance, matching real-world clinical problems with digitized “expert case records” through specific search technologies), MACROCURA is not merely an AI-assisted diagnostic software developer. Instead, it follows a different technological pathway. To ensure that the trained digital models more accurately align with their intended targets, MACROCURA starts by standardizing and structuring foundational medical data, integrating multidisciplinary computer science and AI technologies. “Thus, it is a living AI software—a self-evolving ‘TCM Super Brain.’”
The value proposition of a product is largely determined by its underlying core technologies. For medical AI products to achieve substantial breakthroughs, companies must invest the “unglamorous” effort required to solidify these foundational technologies. This has also been why MACROCURA has remained relatively low-profile since its establishment.
After years of exploration, MACROCURA has brought to the forefront the applied achievements built upon its three independently developed core technologies—“A,” “B,” and “C”: the MACROCURA AI-Assisted TCM Prescription System (hereinafter referred to as “MACROCURA Intelligence”).
“A” Artificial Intelligence is a practical technology:MACROCURA has built its foundational technology by proposing an intelligent medical decision-making architecture that combines a machine learning-based intelligent decision engine with expertise distilled from experienced clinicians. This approach not only preserves the “authentic” clinical reasoning of experts by leveraging deep learning models, real-world clinical cases from renowned veteran TCM practitioners, and authoritative knowledge bases, but also enables timely iterations in response to changes in the volume of medical big data. It facilitates hybrid compatibility among different TCM schools of thought, allowing them to operate either independently or in combination, thereby fundamentally ensuring the continuous evolution of the system’s decision-making capabilities.
“B” Basic Data Is the Application Foundation:Leveraging its profound understanding of the healthcare industry, MACROCURA utilizes artificial intelligence technologies to clean and process diverse clinical data from traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) classics, renowned physicians’ case records, symptoms, diseases, quality metrics, and pharmaceuticals. This process transforms various types of structured and unstructured clinical data into unified, standardized models. The data is first annotated by MACROCURA’s medical team and then rigorously reviewed by TCM experts at multiple levels, thereby maximizing the preservation and restoration of authentic case information. This enables “dialogue” among different data sets, ensuring the quality of input data. Furthermore, as machines do not suffer from fatigue or require rest, AI continuously engages in high-quality self-learning and growth. This elevates the sophistication of diagnostic reasoning, providing physicians with more stable and robust support.
“C” Expands Its Scope of Application to the Cloud:To minimize the operational and maintenance burden on primary care TCM institutions, MACROCURA provides unified development tools and service governance, enabling rapid deployment and go-live. Primary care institutions need only purchase an annual service subscription. To address their personalized needs, more flexible cloud-based applications have been launched, significantly reducing user costs. Notably, MACROCURA has invested substantially in implementing triple-layer protection for all patient data, thereby providing comprehensive, high-density security for user data.
Building on these three core achievements, MACROCURA has partnered with tiered hospitals and primary healthcare institutions across China. Leveraging its industry advantages and technical prowess, while integrating the strengths of its partners, MACROCURA has meticulously refined and developed a comprehensive ecosystem of product applications, including the MACROCURA AI-Assisted TCM Prescription System, MACROCURA Academy, and MACROCURA Cloud Pharmacy. This enables a closed-loop application of full-process data spanning “pre-diagnosis, during diagnosis, and post-diagnosis.”
Ma Jun’ang likens the process of physician consultation to solving a mathematical problem. The patient’s chief complaints, symptoms, and physical signs are analogous to independent variables; the physician’s clinical reasoning is equivalent to a formula. Combining a specific formula with these independent variables forms a function, and the resulting prescription corresponds to the calculated function value. “The MAIJING system internally employs a ‘Syndrome Differentiation Radar’ to guide physicians through the four diagnostic methods—inspection, auscultation/olfaction, inquiry, and palpation. As questions progress in depth, continuous algorithmic computations are performed to derive diagnostic and prescriptive outcomes, thereby enhancing the quality and efficiency of care provided by primary-care physicians.” Thus, physicians need only input the independent variables, and the MAIJING system will guide them in selecting the appropriate formula to ultimately yield an accurate function value.
Since 1900, the average human life expectancy has nearly doubled, rising from under forty years to its current level. However, while lifespan has extended, the period spent living with disease has also increased. During this time, the incidence and mortality rates of chronic diseases have remained largely unchanged. Western medicine is grounded in reductionist logic, focusing primarily on treating the “disease” itself, whereas Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) follows a systems-based approach, aiming to treat the “person” who is ill. Consequently, while Western medicine excels at treating many conditions, TCM plays an irreplaceable role in disease prevention and the management of complex diseases.
“The best physicians treat disease before it arises” presupposes the availability of highly skilled practitioners. However, there is a severe shortage of high-quality traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) resources, causing many people to hesitate when choosing TCM. This has led to a phenomenon in the TCM industry characterized by “strong demand at both ends but weak demand in the middle”: appointments with specialists at tertiary Grade-A hospitals and provincial TCM hospitals are extremely difficult to secure, while wellness centers, foot bath parlors, and health supplement businesses thrive. In contrast, many TCM clinics remain quiet and struggle to achieve profitability. This situation stems from a bottleneck in expanding the pool of high-caliber TCM professionals; top-tier talent is difficult to replicate and rarely filters down to primary healthcare institutions that are in greater need of TCM services.
MACROCURA’s solution is precisely targeted at this vast untapped market. In Ma Jun’ang’s view, the strength of a company’s core competitiveness lies in its ability to truly address users’ problems. Specifically for TCM practitioners, this means helping them prescribe effective treatments and alleviate patients’ suffering. He likens the MACROCURA intelligent system to a “navigation system” for TCM clinical practice. By continuously learning from the extensive experience and wisdom of renowned senior experts, the system emulates their clinical reasoning. With the system’s assistance, less-experienced “novice TCM practitioners” can achieve a level of clinical proficiency approaching that of distinguished senior experts. This will significantly increase the availability of high-quality TCM resources in society, greatly enhancing quality of life alongside gains in life expectancy.
Currently, leveraging its prior R&D accumulation, MACROCURA has rapidly acquired nearly 20,000 primary care physician users within the past two years and accumulated close to 2 million real-world medical case records. On the expert side, MACROCURA has established in-depth collaborations with Professor Huang Huang of the International Jingfang College at Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, as well as other experts and scholars, integrating the clinical practical experience and theoretical research works of renowned senior TCM practitioners into MACROCURA’s expert diagnostic system. Furthermore, MACROCURA has entered into partnerships with leading domestic pharmaceutical manufacturers in areas such as technology R&D, providing primary care TCM practitioners with a full-chain TCM service solution encompassing “diagnosis + pharmaceutical information flow + professional development + patient health management.” In addition, MACROCURA is collaborating with international healthcare companies such as Nichi-Iko Pharmaceutical and Phoenix Pharma, aiming to expand into international markets including Japan and Europe.
Meanwhile, MACROCURA is deploying AI systems on regional platforms at the county and district level to co-build Medical Community Consortia, achieving integrated traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) services from villages, towns, and communities up to county hospitals. It also establishes regional shared TCM pharmacies, addressing the shortage of medical resources and medicines at the grassroots level through centralized distribution. In terms of business model, the MACROCURA intelligent system can operate independently or be embedded as individual modules into enterprise systems.
As data volumes continue to expand, MACROCURA plans to establish a real-world medical case database after de-identifying relevant data. This database will be accessible to clinicians and students for learning purposes, aiming to support TCM students in their theoretical studies and clinical practice, thereby shortening their professional development timeline. Additionally, it will intelligently identify diseases that align with physicians’ strengths, providing clear direction for their future career development.
It is understood that MACROCURA will continue to refine its products and vigorously expand market coverage, linking MACROCURA Intelligence with doctors and the industry to penetrate into more application scenarios. Ma Junang concluded by expressing his gratification that a large number of healthcare entrepreneurs are emerging in the industry, with many peers also contributing to the cause of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). “The medical field is vast and endlessly fascinating. We are willing to be friends with time, delving deep gradually, walking alongside industry practitioners, and striving together to protect and develop TCM, while forging ahead to improve everyone’s quality of life.”