Inject IT to Boost the Biomedical Industry

Transcription

1 General Information and Statistics Inject IT to Boost the Biomedical Industry These are exciting times for the healthcare and the life sciences industries æ and for visionary IT service and solution providers that have the domain knowledge and expertise to support the needs of the healthcare industry. In addition to the usual e-commerce supply chain and transaction support, solutions can also be provided that incorporate and automate specific domain expertise for healthcare and pharmaceutical industry players. This will improve regulatory compliance, drug development processes, improve speed to market and medical service quality. Examples of such solutions are: Clinical trial data management: Clinical trials are needed to test new drugs, verify their effectiveness and gain government approval. Effective clinical trial data management helps to ensure accuracy, while reducing the cost and time taken for clinical trials. It also ensures effective process audit and monitoring. This results in launching products faster, thus generating additional revenue over a product s patent life. Pharmaco-economic analysis: This refers to the analysis of medical outcomes, drug efficacy and therapeutic pathway costs, and the translation of this into economic and medical benefits. By using IT solutions, assistance is provided in project management and implementation, allowing government and private organisations to assess the health impact, costs and benefits of products, services and healthcare interventions. Case mix management: Such solutions enable healthcare providers to identify and control their costs associated with patient and disease management, and to ensure best practices in terms of financial risk management. Done effectively, it helps organisations maximise their resource spending, leading to greater efficiency. Resource deployment modelling: Such solutions facilitate efforts by healthcare service and life science players to deploy their resources and personnel efficiently. Optimised resource utilisation leads to the establishment of effective global operations. These innovative services can be provided via an application service provider operation, providing expertise, security and an audit trail. The biomedical industry is just beginning to discover the huge potential of the Internet. Having to work within increasingly sophisticated government regulatory frameworks, healthcare and pharmaceutical players have traditionally been relatively slow to adopt new technologies until they have been tried and tested. But to survive in the competitive environment, organizations are struggling to keep pace with rapid growth rates, and focus their resources on achieving maximum efficiency. While IT and the Internet can play a key role in ensuring their success and effectiveness, it is critical to recognize that these technologies are a means to an end and not an end in themselves. Having to work within increasingly sophisticated government regulatory frameworks, healthcare and pharmaceutical players have traditionally been relatively slow to adopt new technologies until they have been tried and tested. An example of how organizations can potentially tap the power of the Internet to be more effective is illustrated by the National Cancer Center (NCC) in Singapore which is working with healthcare IT solutions provider, Systems for Health Management Pte Ltd, to implement the first Web-enabled clinical trial data management system within Asia. Through the use of Internet technology, the system will allow NCC to collaborate on global cancer research projects with internationally acclaimed cancer centers and with pharmaceutical industry partners. This can hasten the development of new treatments for cancer. 374 APBN Vol. 5 No

2 China and Thailand to Co-produce Acupuncture Needles With the increasing demand for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in the local market, Thailand and China have recently agreed to jointly produce acupuncture needles in Thailand. Mr. Mongkol Na Songkla, permanent-secretary for Public Health Ministry said that Thailand and China will jointly build a factory to produce the special medical tool and this will also help create new jobs for the local people. The plant could either be located in the eastern province of Chonburi, or in the northern province of Lamphun. Mr. Songkla also said that another advantage of the joint venture project is that it will help lower the costs of needles for Thai patients significantly. The price for each piece of acupuncture needle will be slashed from 13 Baht (US 28 cents) to one Baht (US 2 cents) once production commences. The standard of the needles is supposed to conform to the criteria set by the World Federation of Acupuncture. Demand for acupuncture needles in Thailand has been rising by 10 percent yearly, with five million needles used last year. In the world market the annual demand for such needles is about five billion pieces. NZ Authorities Decline Clinical Trials Transplanting Pig Cells to Humans New Zealand s Director-General of Health, Dr. Karen Poutasi, has recently declined an application from local company, Diatranz, to start clinical trials transplanting insulin-producing pancreas cells from pigs to humans. Dr. Poutasi said that regulatory agencies throughout the world had concerns about the transmission of retroviruses through the transplanting of live pig tissue into humans. It is feared that a pig virus may cross species to infect humans. The scientific director of Diantranz, Professor Bob Elliot, said his company may appeal against the decision. He said that the health authorities are taking an overly cautious stand on the work. Shenzhen to Build Eco- Agricultural High-Tech Park China s booming southern city of Shenzhen will spend RMB3 billion (US$362 million) to build a modern eco-agricultural high-tech industrial park. A blueprint drafted by the municipal government shows that the 4533 hectare park will consist of three parts: the Guangming-Gongming High-tech Agriculture Zone; the Pingshan Eco-agricultural Science and Technologies, and a boar breeding center; as well as a seedling nursery in cooperation with an American company, which will be built inside the Guangming- Gongming zone. Pollution-free vegetables and fruit, and flowers will also be produced in the zone. The Pingshan eco-agricultural science and technology corridor will feature 13 specialized centers devoted to 13 different plants and animals covering tea, genetically modified pigs and other cattles and so on. The marine life high-tech zone will concentrate on industrialized breeding of abalone, high-yield shrimps, fish fry, breeding of fish in deep-water areas, and research on marine life and disease prevention. When the park is fully completed, it is expected to generate an additional output value of RMB2.28 billion (US$275 million) each year. The scientific director of Diantranz, Professor Bob Elliot, said his company may appeal against the decision. He said that the health authorities are taking an overly cautious stand on the work. Professor Elliot said the retrovirus issue had been laid to rest, and the evidence for this is the approval given this year by the US Food and Drug Administration to allow this type of research. Dr. Poutassi said there were dire consequences if the fears about xenotransplantation were realized. She said the Ministry of Health would continue to consider applications for clinical trials involving xenotransplantation and would monitor overseas developments. APBN Vol. 5 No

3 Kumho Science International Award in Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology Presented to Eight Plant Scientists The award ceremony for the second Kumho Science International Award in Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology was held at Kumho Art Hall, Seoul, Korea, on July 27, A number of distinguished guests were present to honor the eight distinguished scientists as the 2001 Recipients of Kumho Science International Award in Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. The award is sponsored by Kumho Cultural Foundation with the support of Kumho Group and Korea Kumho Petrochemical Co. The first award was presented to Professor Ingo Potrykus of Swiss Federal Institute of Science and Technology for the development of Golden Rice last year. As has been the policy from the first award, this year s eight awardees were selected by the International Society for Plant Molecular Biology for their monumental work on the sequence determination of the entire genome for the plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. The award carries a prize stipend of US$ This year the following eight awardee recipients shared the prize money of US$ As an international team, they succeeded in determining the complete sequence of the plant genome at about the same time as the human genome. The significance of this milestone cannot be overemphasized. As they say, the 21 st century is a BT era, BT for biotechnology. The plant genome we have today and many other genomic information to follow will form the basis of BT research and industry for the good of mankind. Dr. Pill-Soon Song, Director of Kumho Life & Environmental Science Laboratory and the master of ceremony for the Kumho Award presentation, points out that the Kumho Science International Award represents a major award in the field of plant science. There are many awards in biomedical sciences, but significantly less in plant science. To recognize the outstanding scientific achievements of plant scientists, the Kumho award was established in Prof. Ingo Potrykus was the first recipient. Dr. Seong Yawng Park, Chairman of the Kumho Cultural Foundation which sponsors the award program, comments about the importance of plant science for the well-being of mankind. He believes that plant genetic engineering will play a critical role to feed the people and improve their quality of life. In this regard, it is indeed appropriate that the second Kumho award recognizes the team of eight scientists who determined the plant genome for the first time. With their work, it is now possible to compare the genetic make-ups of animal/human and plants and to understand the mysteries of life, like for example how the tiny plant Arabidopsis can produce beautiful flowers, but man cannot! Dr. Park hopes that this award truly becomes a major international science award to celebrate some of the most outstanding scientific achievements of this new millennium. The 2001 Kumho Science International Awardees Professor Michael Bevan is the Head, Cell and Developmental Biology Department, John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK and Professor, University of East Anglia, present. He received his BSc, MSc (Hons) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and his PhD Cantab He did his postdoctoral research at Washington University in St Louis, MO, USA, Dr. Bevan was a Staff Scientist, Plant Breeding Institute, Cambridge, UK, , and Head Molecular Genetics Dept, Plant Breeding Institute/John Innes Centre, Francis Quetier is a Professor at Evry University and the Deputy Director of Genoscope. He did his background studies at Paris-XI Orsay University (France) and was recruited as an Assistant Lecturer (1964) and then as a Professor in the Orsay University ( ). His research career began in 1964 with the study of plant DNA at Orsay and became focused on chloroplast and mitochondrial genome organization from 1970 onwards. He joined Jean Weissenbach's team at Genethon in 1995 (human genome). Since 1996 he has been involved in the sequencing of the various eukaryotic genomes carried out by Genoscope. 376 APBN Vol. 5 No

4 Joseph R. Ecker is a professor at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla California. He received his bachelor's degree in 1978 from The College of New Jersey, his Ph.D. in microbiology from Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine in He did postdoctoral studies at Stanford University School of Medicine, under Ronald W. Davis. In 1987 Ecker joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and the Plant Science Institute. He became a Salk faculty member in 2000 where he is a member of the Laboratory of Plant Biology, and the Director of the Salk Institute Genomic Analysis Laboratory. Rob Martienssen is a professor at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory in New York. He recieved a B.A. in Natural Sciences (1982) and a PhD in Plant Genetics (1986) from Cambridge University, UK. He did his graduate work with David Baulcombe at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge, and postdoctoral studies in maize genetics with Bill Taylor and Mike Freeling at the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a faculty member in the plant group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since Chris Somerville is the Director of the Carnegie Institution Department of Plant Biology and a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1973, and a Ph.D. in genetics in 1978, both from The University of Alberta. He did postdoctoral studies at The University of Illinois with Bill Ogren. Prior to moving to Carnegie/Stanford he was a faculty member at The University of Alberta ( ) and the DOE Plant Research Laboratory at Michigan State University ( ). Owen White is Director of Bioinformatics at TIGR. He has been responsible for development of TIGR's annotation methodology. He leads the Comprehensive Microbial Resource project sponsored by the Department of Energy. Dr. White managed much of the annotation and analysis of the Arabidopsis genome sequence. His team will be responsible for the continued international effort to maintain and improve the Arabidopsis database. Dr. White received a B.S. degree in Biotechnology in 1985 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His Ph.D. in Moleular Biology is from New Mexico State University in After two years postdoctoral work, he continued at TIGR as a collaborative investigator ( ) and as assistant investigator ( ). Dr. White was appointed Deputy Director of Bioinformatics and Associate Investigator in In 2000, he was named Director of Bioinformatics and Investigator at TIGR. Athanasios Theologis is a Senior Scientist at the Plant Gene Expression Center/USDA and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967 from the Agricultural College of Athens, Athens, Greece, and his Ph.D. in 1979 from the Department of Biology, UCLA, Los Angeles, California. He received postdoctoral training at Stanford University, Stanford, California, in the Department of Biological Sciences ( ) and in the Department of Biochemistry, Stanford School of Medicine ( ). From , Dr. Theologis was an Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Chemistry, Washington University, School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri. Satoshi Tabata is Project leader, Kazusa DNA Research Institute. He received his undergraduate education in the Department of Biology, School of Science, Kobe University ( ) and his graduate education at the Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, receiving his Ph.D. in He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of California, San Diego. He was a Technical Official and then an Assistant Professor at Kyoto University, an Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at Nagoya University, and then became a Senior Researcher at the Kazusa DNA Research Institute. APBN Vol. 5 No

5 US Cancer Conference to Focus on Nutrition, Cancer Research in China and Individualization of Cancer Treatments in the 21st Century Recent breakthroughs in cancer research and the promise of individualized cancer treatments in the 21st century will be the focus of a US National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) Conference, Breaking Down Cancer: Research for a Cure, to be held 13 to 15 September, 2001 at Georgetown University. In addition, Dr. Graham Richards, chairman of chemistry and director of the NFCR Center for Computational Drug Discovery at Oxford University, will provide preliminary results from the NFCR-Intel- United Devices Research for a Cure computing project made possible by over individual PC users who have downloaded a software to analyze drug molecule interactions. At this conference top scientists, including the director of the Chinese National Human Genome Project, will focus on breakthroughs in cancer research: The areas to be covered at this conference include: Individualization of cancer treatments in the 21st century Breakthroughs in cancer research in China Nutrition and cancer: science behind the hype Update on new cancer drugs made possible by PC users worldwide New molecular targets for cancer research Details can be obtained from the following website: or call NFCR at (301) For media inquiries about the conference, contact Silas Deane at Silas@Logicmediagroup.com or call (615) Swedish Delegation Seeks Collaboration with Taiwan in Biotech A Swedish delegation that visited Taiwan recently emphasized collaborative possibilities in biotechnology between the two nations. The Taiwan office of the Invest in Sweden Agency and the Taiwan s Development Center for Biotechnology jointly held a seminar in Taipei recently. Mr. Kai Hammerich, director of Invest in Sweden Agency, spoke in general of the advantages of investing in Sweden, emphasizing his nation s strengths in R& D, technical competence and relatively low business costs. He said, contrary to popular belief, the cost of doing business in Sweden is low. This is because the corporate tax in Sweden being amongst the lowest in Europe at 28 percent, low property costs, and the country s welldeveloped infrastructure. According to the statistics from a recent United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Sweden is currently the world s seventh largest receipient of foreign direct investment over the last five years. It was the fourth in Sweden is working with the Taiwan s Department of Health in developing industry regulations for the pharmaceutical and medical industries. Currently there have been a number of collaborative efforts between Taiwan and Sweden in the medical and life sciences fields. Sweden is working with the Taiwan s Department of Health in developing industry regulations for the pharmaceutical and medical industries. On the education side, Sweden s university exchange program has enabled Taiwanese students to take up studies at Sweden s top universities. With the pharmaceutical giants AstraZeneca and Pharmacia & Upjohn, Sweden has a strong base in the pharmaceutical industry as well as well-developed medical devices, nano-science and biomaterials industries. One potential collaborative area between Sweden and Taiwan is the prostheics industry. Sweden companies producing artificial limbs and joints are seeking Taiwan s expertise in macroelectronics to make products that give motion and position feedback to the user. 378 APBN Vol. 5 No

6 APBN Vol. 5 No

7 Singapore Genomics Program Renamed the Genome Institute of Singapore A new name to better reflect its role as a research institute. The Singapore Genomics Program, the flagship public sector research program of Singapore s US$3 billion Biomedical Sciences initiative, has been renamed as the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS). The new name is expected to better reflect its role as a research institute. The Singapore Biomedical Sciences initiative was the result of a ministerial decision to make the life sciences one of the main pillars of Singapore s economy. The GIS will continue the efforts of the former Singapore Genomics Program launched in June It is a national initiative with a global vision that seeks to use genomic sciences to improve public health and public prosperity. As a center for genomic discovery, it will pursue the integration of technology, genetics, and biology towards the goal of individualized medicine. The GIS will provide a focal point where multidisciplinary research involving clinicians, scientists, engineers and computer scientists can be carried out to study the genetic make-up of the diverse Asian population. The aim is to help develop new diagnostic methods and treatment of diseases affecting Asians to further improve public health and welfare in Asia Pacific. In January 2001, Dr. Edison Liu, then Scientific Director of the Division of Clinical Sciences at the National Cancer Institute, was named its first Executive Director assuming the helm of the GIS on March 10, To achieve its goal of world class status, the GIS has assembled an international group of scientists for its Scientific Advisory Board. The GIS has listed the following as its insitutional goals: To develop a world-class genomics institute investigating post-sequence questions To advance the understanding of genetics in Asian populations To address biomedical questions relevant to Asia and Singapore To provide the genomic infrastructure for Singapore and the region To establish a training platform in the genomic sciences for Singapore To explore new ways to optimize partnerships with the commercial sector ORDER FORM Homepage: Please send orders to your regular book supplier or directly to your nearest World Scientific office: New subscription rate for 2001 USA World Scientific Publishing Co. Inc Main Street, River Edge, NJ 07661, USA. Toll-free fax: Toll-free: sales@wspc.com UK World Scientific Publishing (UK) Ltd. 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE, UK. Fax: Tel: sales@wspc.co.uk SINGAPORE World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. Farrer Road, P O Box 128, SINGAPORE Cable: "COSPUB Fax: Tel: sales@wspc.com.sg HONG KONG World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. P O Box 72482, Kowloon Central Post Office, HONG KONG. Fax: Tel: wsped@pacific.net.hk INDIA World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. #10, Royal Park, 34 Park Road, Tasker Town, Bangalore INDIA. Fax/Tel: wspcind@blr.vsnl.net.in TAIWAN World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. 4F-5, No. 88, Sec 3, Hsin-Sheng S Road, Taipei, TAIWAN. Fax: Tel: wsptw@ms13.hinet.net ISSN: Asia-Pacific Biotech News I wish to subscribe to the English US$206 Per annum English edition (developing countries US$ 94 Per annum (The frequency for this publication is fortnightly) Customers in Europe, please note our teleordering mnemonic is WSPC. Please send me a complimentary copy of the ASIA-PACIFIC BIOTECH NEWS! 380 Please APBN add my Vol. name 5 No. to 16 your 2001 mailing list. My field of interest is Prices subject to change without prior notice. Name: (Prof/Dr/Mr/Ms) Address: Fax: Tel: Organization: City: State: Zip: Country: METHODS OF PAYMENT : Please enclose your personal cheque (made payable to World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.) or details of your credit card for individual subscription. Cheque/Bank draft enclosed for Charge my VISA MC Amex Diners Club Card No: Exp. Date: Signature: Bill my company/institution: (Please attach purchase order) "RUSH ORDERS" In USA and Canada Call toll-free In Europe Fax: In other countries Fax: NEW JERSEY LONDON SINGAPORE HONG KONG BANGALORE