New Straits Times, October 15, 2007

Collaboration, funding to drive bioinformatics

By Foo Eu Jin

The bioinformatics sector must be further developed through collaboration by the public and private sectors to make sure that the objectives of the National Biotechnology Policy are duly met.

According to consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, there are still a number of challenges that have to be overcome to establish Malaysia as a leading bioinformatics player within the region. The country currently lags economics powerhouse Japan, Australia, India, Singapore and South Korea.

“Bioinformatics in the Asia-Pacific (including Malaysia) is currently being driven predominantly by government-funded initiatives. The key restraint has been the opportunity to get engaged in global and regional partnership. The ability to train a whole new generation of knowledge personnel requires time to reach critical mass and to develop new applications and services,” said Frost & Sullivan’s director, healthcare practice Asia-Pacific Nitin Naik.

He pointed out that the bioinformatics landscape is set to change in the near future as increasingly more private informatics startups are being formed.

“Today, large pharmaceuticals companies in the region and IT companies that are entering the arena with their technical skills are driving the informatics initiatives. So, the Malaysia market is witnessing a shift to a state in which a large number of private sector organisations are holding considerable sequence information in the proprietary domain. This will certainly give the industry to boost.”

In Malaysia, the key driver has been Government support through MSC Malaysia and major incubation facilities such as Technology Park Malaysia and Malaysian Biotechnology Corporation (MBC).

“MBC has been actively spearheading this transformation by participating in global events like the Boston Bio, and this will gradually help attract foreign investors as well as bring in the much-needed specialised talent pool to take the bioinformatics industry to the next level,”, Naik said.

“Under the Ninth Malaysian Plan, the Government has targeted to at least double the number of biotechnology and biotechnology-related companies to 400 by 2010. To transform this sector into a vibrant one, financing will be crucial.”

He highlighted that the public sector will be complement private sector financing with an allocation of RM 2 billion, which includes a number of programmes to improve access to financing by private sector.

“So, the private sector can bring in a two-fold contribution by identifying international partners and developing joint ventures to develop momentum.”

Naik also said it is necessary to foster public-private sector partnership such as the ongoing research for the national grid computing initiatives which includes a teleradiology project involving researchers from Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Universiti Sains Malaysia, Universiti Teknologi Mara and the Malaysian Institute of Nuclear Technology. Other collaborations include cancer cell visualisation at the Universiti Malaya and Multimedia University, and the bioinformatics project at UPM.

According to Naik, about 20 per cent of the current novel drug discovery programmes are based on genomics, and this is fuelling the growth of bioinformatics.

“This presents an opportunity to bioinformatics companies as date captured, management, analysis and dissemination could play a vital role in containing both cost and time. Specifically in Malaysia, there has been of focus on using bioinformatics applications in the agri-biotechnology space like palm oil, in traditional Chinese medicine and in developing a new generation of biofuel,” Naik said.