WORK Medical Targets China's MedTech Hub with New 'Interpretable' AI

HANGZHOU, China – December 29, 2025 – In a significant move poised to shake up China's competitive medical diagnostics landscape, WORK Medical Technology Group LTD (Nasdaq: WOK) has secured a strategic partnership to launch its next-generation AI-Automated Blood Cell Morphology Analyzer. The company announced today that its subsidiary, Hunan Saitumofei, has granted exclusive one-year distribution rights to Shanghai Benke Medical Technology Co., Ltd. for the promotion and sale of the newly approved CM-B600 analyzer throughout East China.

The agreement, effective from January 1 to December 31, 2026, sets an ambitious minimum sales target of RMB 10 million (approximately US$1.4 million). This deal marks a critical step in the commercialization of WORK Medical's advanced diagnostic technology, placing it directly into one of the world's most dynamic economic and healthcare regions.

A Strategic Play in a High-Stakes Market

The choice of East China for the CM-B600's initial large-scale rollout is a calculated strategic decision. The exclusive territory covers Jiangsu Province, Shanghai Municipality, and Zhejiang Province—the core of the economically powerful Yangtze River Delta. This region is not only a hub of financial and technological activity but also home to a dense concentration of advanced hospitals, private clinics, and independent laboratories, creating a fertile ground for high-tech medical devices.

By partnering with Shanghai Benke, WORK Medical is leveraging a local distributor with deep roots and an established sales network in this crucial territory. While specific market share data for private distributors like Shanghai Benke is often proprietary, the structure of the deal speaks volumes. Shanghai Benke has prepaid a performance bond of RMB 1 million, a substantial commitment that signals strong confidence in the product's market potential and their ability to meet the sales target. This financial stake incentivizes a vigorous sales effort and mitigates risk for WORK Medical.

The RMB 10 million sales target, while ambitious for a first-year launch, appears to be a realistic goalpost. Depending on the final unit price, which for comparable advanced analyzers can range from RMB 350,000 to over RMB 1 million, this target could translate to the sale of roughly 10 to 28 units. Capturing this slice of the market in just twelve months will be a significant challenge, especially given the formidable presence of established global and domestic giants like Sysmex, Siemens Healthineers, and the dominant Chinese player, Mindray. To succeed, the CM-B600 must offer a compelling value proposition that sets it apart from the competition.

The 'Interpretable AI' Differentiator

WORK Medical is betting that the CM-B600's unique technological approach will be its key differentiator. The analyzer, which received its Class II medical device manufacturing approval from Chinese regulators in November 2025, simulates the gold-standard workflow of manual microscopic examination with remarkable speed and precision. It can process up to 150 samples per batch, with an average detection time of no more than three minutes per blood smear, and boasts a classification accuracy of over 90% for key white blood cell types.

However, its most significant innovation lies in how it achieves these results. The press release highlights the use of "non-deep-learning feature extraction algorithms," including region-based level set segmentation and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms. This technical detail is crucial because it directly addresses one of the biggest concerns in medical AI: the "black box" problem.

Many contemporary AI systems, particularly those using deep learning, can arrive at a conclusion without revealing the steps in their reasoning process. This lack of transparency can be unsettling for clinicians who are ultimately responsible for a patient's diagnosis. WORK Medical's CM-B600, by contrast, is designed for "high interpretability." Its algorithms are based on extracting well-defined, human-understandable features from cell images—such as nucleus-to-cytoplasm ratio and granularity—before classification. This means a hematologist can more easily understand why the AI classified a cell as abnormal, allowing for more confident verification and reducing the potential clinical risks associated with unchecked algorithmic errors. This focus on explainable AI (XAI) could prove to be a powerful selling point, building a foundation of trust with laboratory professionals who are cautious about ceding critical tasks to opaque systems.

Reshaping the Modern Laboratory

The introduction of automated, AI-powered systems like the CM-B600 is set to fundamentally reshape the workflow of clinical laboratories. Manual blood smear analysis is a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and subjective process that is prone to inter-observer variability. It requires highly trained technicians to spend hours peering through microscopes, a task that can lead to fatigue and potential errors.

The CM-B600 automates this entire process, from sample scanning to cell identification and classification. With a database capacity of over 350,000 high-definition blood cell images and the ability to identify 17 subtypes of white blood cells and various red blood cell and platelet abnormalities, the system provides a level of detail and consistency that is difficult to achieve manually at scale. This automation promises to dramatically increase laboratory throughput, reduce turnaround times for test results, and standardize the quality of analysis across different shifts and technicians.

More importantly, it allows for a strategic reallocation of human expertise. By handling the vast majority of routine, normal slides, the AI frees up skilled hematologists and cytotechnologists to concentrate on what they do best: investigating complex, rare, and ambiguous cases that require nuanced human judgment. This synergy between human expert and AI tool represents the future of diagnostic medicine, enhancing both efficiency and the overall quality of patient care.

Paving the Way for Future Growth

For WORK Medical, this exclusive distribution agreement is more than just a single deal; it's a strategic beachhead for a much broader campaign. The company, which already has a diverse portfolio of 21 medical products sold across China and in over 30 countries, sees this launch as a critical test of its high-tech commercialization strategy.

Mr. Shuang Wu, CEO and Chairman of WORK Medical, emphasized this vision in his comments, stating, “We believe this rollout in East China will serve as a benchmark for broader adoption, laying a solid foundation for future expansion across China and into international markets.”

Success in the highly competitive and sophisticated East China market would provide powerful validation for the CM-B600's technology and its 'interpretable AI' approach. It would create a successful case study and a set of best practices that could be replicated as the company expands its sales efforts into other regions of China. With 17 of its products already registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, WORK Medical has demonstrated its ability to meet stringent international standards, and a successful domestic launch of its flagship AI device will be a crucial step in preparing it for a future debut on the global stage.