This year’s theme for World Standards Day on October 14th is “Shared Vision for a Better World: SPOTLIGHT ON SDG 17 - PARTNERSHIPS FOR THE GOALS” and emphasizes global cooperation through international standards.
In practice, standards provide a common framework for addressing global challenges, from public health crises to environmental protection, allowing industry, government, and academia to work together effectively.
“Shared vision for a better world” is the theme of 2025 World Standards Day.
Credible international standards are rooted in solid, reproducible scientific consensus. The rigor of BGI Group's research is clear from its consistent high ranking in the Nature Index and its impressive publication record. As of August 2025, BGI has published a total of 5,800 scientific papers, including 751 in leading journals such as Cell, Nature, and Science, and their related publications. The 2025 Nature Index annual research ranking places BGI Group fourth worldwide among bioscience companies, and BGI has held the top spot among companies in the Asia-Pacific region for the past decade.
To date, BGI has proposed or participated in the development and publication of 412 standards, with 77 approved new proposals currently underway, spanning multiple critical areas of life science, including birth defect prevention and control, precision oncology, life science tools, and gene synthesis and editing, etc.
Internationally, BGI Group has proposed or participated in the development of 8 international standards as well as 2 high-throughput sequencing CEN standards.
The international standards are important to the fields of biotechnology, medical laboratories, and in-vitro diagnostics. For example, the standards help set out global specifications on how specific animal, plant and human biosamples should be preserved.
In 2022 a standard co-proposed by BGI, became the first Chinese international standard approved and developed in its field, establishing a unified technical benchmark for global nucleic acid testing. Currently, BGI is actively involved in other standards that will help address future public health challenges, including emerging technology guidelines, high-throughput sequencing oncology applications, and infectious disease sequencing.
In the area of data standardization, BGI Group has helped develop standards providing general requirements for data processing of shotgun metagenomic sequences and rules for genomic data for genetic detection products and services.
While in the strategic field of synthetic biology, BGI participated in the first international standard for synthetic biology, establishing globally harmonized technical specifications for the quality control of synthesized genes.
Some of the international standards developed and supported by the BGI Group.
Currently, BGI Group is supporting the development of 13 new international standard proposals in emerging areas such as precision medicine and life science tools.
For example, BGI is actively driving the development of standards for deep-sea biomaterials, standards for therapeutic bacteriophages, which offer the potential to create a new framework for combating antibiotic-resistant infections, and standards for Nucleic acid- and protein-based devices which will provide a foundation for integrated innovation across synthetic biology and biomanufacturing.
Working alongside global partners, BGI Group will continue to build a foundation of mutual trust in the life sciences, enabling research findings to be better shared and applied within a framework of international consensus, creating a collaborative blueprint for the technologies of tomorrow and ensuring the safe, mutually recognized, and responsible development of these technologies. This is, indeed a “shared vision of a better world”.
References:
Standards referred to in this article include ISO/TS 20388:2021, ISO/TS 23105:2021, ISO 24603:2022, ISO/TS 23511:2023, ISO/TS 5798:2022, ISO/TS 24420:2023, ISO/TS 8392:2023, ISO 20688-2:2024