Singapore presents a strategic location for companies to navigate Asia's diversity and complexities, while harnessing the region's market opportunities, intellectual properties and talent base.

Singapore is an attractive center of excellence in science, research and development. This attractiveness and the ambitions of the Singapore government to become even more attractive is clearly visible in the number and the quality of global companies which chose Singapore for the establishment of research facilities, Asia headquarters and distribution centers. The economical development of Singapore's biotech and healthcare sectors are remarkable. This development seems to be correlated with the governments' investments in research facilities and infrastructure.

BIOforum Europe talked to Mr. Beh Kian Teik, Director, Biomedical Sciences, Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB).

Could you please give us a short overview on the development of Singapore's biotech and healthcare industry in the last decade? What are the strategies and visions for Singapore as a location for industry in the biotech and healthcare business?

Beh Kian Teik: Singapore's vision is to be the Biopolis of Asia, a leading international biomedical sciences cluster advancing human health by achieving excellence across the entire value chain. This entails having a strong R&D base to complement Singapore's role as a global manufacturing hub; as medical insights, disease biology, new medicines and novel manufacturing processes are discovered and developed in Singapore's R&D labs & hospitals, new medicines are manufactured in our commercial plants.

In the year 2000, we launched Singapore's Biomedical Sciences (BMS) initiative to establish a focused effort on the development of this sector as the fourth pillar of Singapore's industry cluster, alongside electronics, chemicals and engineering.

The first phase of the BMS initiative (2000-2005) put in place key building blocks by establishing core capabilities in biomedical research, and introducing important human capital and industrial capital development initiatives. Key initiatives include a S$ 1 billion national scholarship to groom 1,000 PhD graduates in the world's best universities and the Biopolis, which co-locates scientists from the public and private sectors.

To date, more than 400 Singaporeans were sent for overseas studies, while the 2.4 million square-feet Biopolis broke ground for its 440,000 square-feet Phase 3 expansion in 2008. During the last six months, Lilly and Abbott officially opened their R&D laboratories in the Biopolis, while Duke Clinical Research Institute announced its collaboration with the Singapore Clinical Research Institute, which will be sited at the Biopolis.

For the next phase (2006-2010), we are building on our scientific foundation and strengthening our capabilities in translational and clinical research to bring discoveries from the bench to the bedside and the marketplace, and ultimately improve human healthcare. Over the past few years, Singapore has invested more than S$ 700 million to build up key infrastructure and capabilities to drive translational and clinical research. They include the Clinical Imaging Research Centre that provides state-of-the-art bioimaging services in collaboration with Siemens; two Investigational Medicine Units that carry out early-phase trials in the National University Hospital and Singapore General Hospital; the Cancer Research Centre of Excellence led by Prof Daniel Tenen from Harvard Medical School; as well as the Centre for Translational Medicine that houses a bio-safety facility and brings faculty, students and researchers under one roof. In addition, we have launched the S$ 125 million Translational and Clinical Research Flagship programs that seek to build up our knowledge in Asian disease biology by bringing scientists and clinicians together to work on five key diseases - cancer, neurodengerative diseases, eye diseases, metabolic diseases and infectious diseases.

The biomedical sciences industry is a key segment of our economy and contributes 5.5% of Singapore's GDP, while employing more than 16,000 people in both manufacturing and R&D. Today, we are one of Asia's leading bio-clusters, with the world's leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies setting up a significant presence across the value chain in R&D, manufacturing, regional headquarters and regional clinical coordination.

What are the differences of Singapore's engagement in this sector in comparison to other Asian countries?

Beh Kian Teik: Singapore presents a strategic location for companies to navigate Asia's diversity and complexities, while harnessing the region's market opportunities, intellectual properties and talent base. By providing excellent connectivity to key Asian markets within a seven-hour flight radius, Singapore also presents a transparent and pro-business environment for companies to carry out marketing and supply chain management in the region.
In R&D, Singapore presents strategic partnership opportunities with world-class scientific and medical institutes to help companies carry out through-train drug candidate to proof-of-concept activities. Leveraging our cosmopolitan English-speaking environment and focus on science and technology, leading scientists have settled in Singapore to lead research institutes and laboratories.