Given this, The Centre for Excellence in Life Sciences (Tcels) has embarked on a crucial mission that could improve the daily lives of Thai people as well as open up new opportunities for Thai businesses and entrepreneurs.

Dr Pornchai Matangkasombat, president of Mahidol University and chairman of Tcels, a non-profit state organisation, told The Nation in an interview that opportunities lie in the field of diagnosis and the outsourcing of drug development work by multinational firms.

In 2005, an estimated US$20.4 billion (Bt781 billion) was spent on research and development for bio-pharmaceutical products worldwide.

The R&D process is divided into five major phases: discovery, pre-clinical testing (lab and animal tests), clinical testing (volunteer tests), new drug applications, and large-scale manufacturing along with safety monitoring.

Last week Pornchai led a media trip to Switzerland, Germany and the UK to observe the latest developments in life sciences. He said Thailand has a good chance of receiving a substantial increase in pre-clinical work and some stages of the clinical testing of new drugs outsourced by multinational firms.

"We currently have several tens of thousands of well-qualified scientists and researchers in medicine and related life sciences," he said. "Actually, we've been doing this work for foreign firms for many years as second-tier subcontractors. Now, the goal is to develop Thailand as a hub in Southeast Asia for both industry and services. Initially, we aim to create what is called a contract research organisation (CRO) to carry out the outsourced work systematically."

According to Pornchai, pharmaceutical firms such as Novartis or Roche of Switzerland usually manage the costly multi-staged testing work at both pre-clinical and clinical levels via a protocol that binds several subcontractors together.

At present, China and India have tapped a significant portion of such outsourced work by major Western drug companies.

"However, there have been problems about the availability of volunteers for testing as well as about the researchers' freedom in doing their work. As for Thailand, one of our strengths is the relatively high-standard national healthcare system, which includes many reliable state hospitals and clinics. Clinical drug tests in Thailand also have a relatively low drop-out rate among volunteers so the tests could be done more quickly and more cost-effectively.

"Overall, the country could earn in excess of Bt100 billion a year in both pre-clinical and clinical drug tests if we had the right infrastructure and management system in place."

Set up in June 2004, Tcels has sought a Bt4.7-billion budget over a five-year period from the government to develop the infrastructure to tap into these lucrative projects.

If successful, Tcels will help position Thailand as a new biotech player in Asia Pacific where the governments of Japan, India, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, China and Taiwan have already given top priority to biotech for national economic development.

Besides Tcels, Pornchai said, Mahidol University has also set up the privately owned Satang company to commercialise the work of Mahidol researchers. Now, there are a total of six subsidiaries commercialising basic research work with the university and researchers being joint shareholders.

For instance, one subsidiary has been selling diagnosis kits for shrimp diseases while another is providing testing and certification services for the cosmetics industry.

The company also plans to set up its own CRO to test the bio-equivalent quality of locally made generic drugs before they can be registered with the authorities.

As for Tcels, he said, it is promoting initiatives in four strategic areas: personalised medicine and bio-informatics, regenerative medicine, life science infrastructure, and products and healthcare.

"We'll bring together the right partners, provide the seed money and find other funding sources, help with the intellectual-property management and support the longer-term development of human resources," he said.

According to Pornchai, the future of R&D for new drugs will likely focus on targeted personalised medicines in order to improve treatment and reduce side-effects.

For years, doctors have recognised that individuals may respond differently to different medicines. An anti-depression drug, for example, may work well with one patient but have less effect on another who might have to try several drugs before finding the right treatment.

Now, scientists' better understanding of the human genome is shedding new light on the role genes play in how people respond to drugs.

This emerging field of personalised medicine promises that medical care in the near future will be developed based on specific genetic traits and through the use of pharmacogenomic markers, doctors could gain the ability to select the safest and most effective drug for each patient.

Nophakhun

Limsamarnphun

The Nation