How Thailand Is Building Drug Discovery, Innovation And Investment

The CEO of the Thailand Centre of Excellence for Life Sciences tells Scrip how the Southeast Asian nation hopes to carve a niche for itself in areas like natural product drug discovery and regenerative medicine, with Japan emerging as an early ally in some of these efforts.

Thailand is seeking to build life science sector

The Thailand Centre of Excellence for Life Sciences (TCELS), which functions under the auspices of the country’s Ministry of Science and Technology, styles itself as an ‘innovation facilitator’. It supports the translation of research to commercialization, where it works closely with universities and research centers, and also accelerates R&D, assisting companies, small and medium sized enterprises, and start-ups, among a range of other activities.

Some of TCELS’ key initiatives are geared towards natural product drug discovery and regenerative medicine. In an interview with Scrip, TCELS CEO Dr. Nares Damrongchai indicated that Thailand is working closely with the Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association towards natural product drug discovery – an area that appears to have evinced some early interest from large US firms as well.

“TCELS is looking at using the whole diversity of Thailand to build into a chemical library and use the chemical library to discover drugs,” Damrongchai said.

Thailand is also hoping to build its pharma industry based on new technology – the small molecules segment is generally saturated in terms of technology, Damrongchai noted.

“The world is moving towards recombinant proteins, monoclonal antibodies and biotech products, and cell and gene therapy is coming. These are things that we keep in mind when we try to develop our life science industry for the future,” he said.

He referred in particular to discussions with companies in the US and Japan after Thailand set up an automated system for tissue culture. “They are starting to see regenerative medicine as a big industry of the future and are looking for collaboration with Thailand if we have the right kind of incentives.”

The following is a Q&A interview with Dr. Damrongchai.

Asia has several strong contenders in the pharmaceutical/ biotechnology space including Malaysia, India, China and South Korea. How does Thailand plan to differentiate itself and attract large investments in the segment?

Our intention is to attract investors to the region because Thailand alone perhaps might not be as attractive. What might have even more impact is the region as a whole as a market, as a human resource or research base. Coupling with the integration of Southeast Asian nations, we think that companies should come and invest and collaborate and partner with the region. We are not trying to differentiate among one and another; rather we would like to collectively be seen as the ASEAN region.

However, then the question is why should they come to Thailand, instead of Malaysia or Indonesia etc? That’s what the Thailand Board of Investment has to offer in terms of the attractiveness as a geographical region, location as a service base, ease in doing business, rental and office space availability, connectivity etc.

For biotech, we think we are gearing up. In areas like clinical trials we think we have advantages over Singapore, which is a city state. You can have laboratories but you can’t do Phase II, III trials there. Beyond that we have a whole range of qualified doctors, laboratories, healthcare personnel. For clinical trials, it would be the same reason why the Middle East countries choose to come to Thailand for healthcare treatment, not other ASEAN countries - the quality standards and the cost.

For research, Thailand has traditionally been quite strong in tropical disease research. The research community – half of them are medical doctors who are also researchers. The other half would be pharmacists and professional researchers who have experience in getting grants from the NIH, WHO for decades. So, we have this stock of human resources, who know how to do research, have connections with hospitals and patients, data in place.

We also invested in human genome research 15-20 years ago. TCELS came in to play its role several years ago by starting the human genome project in Thailand, which has now become the Medical Genome Centre; so we are getting stronger.

Also, the network with Japan and Southeast Asia in human genome research is mostly driven by Thailand. We are one of the most active members.

Some of the key TCELS initiatives are around regenerative medicines and natural products. But to propel these, the regulatory systems should ideally evolve alongside?

The regulation for regenerative medicine is quickly moving because we see large corporations having interest in coming to Thailand as a home base for not only treatment but also for manufacturing for regenerative products. This investment potential, coupled with what we have already done in the segment is the reason why they are interested in Thailand.

In the past half year, at the policy level, the Deputy Prime Minister is aware of the potential of regenerative medicine and this only happened half a year ago. We are incorporating regenerative medicine into our national plan.

TCELS plans to develop a compound library in the area of natural products and facilitate the potential use of the chemical library to discover drugs. How far have these plans progressed and what is the kind of capacity building collaboration it has in place with the Japanese pharmaceutical industry?

A project has started at Chulalongkorn University supported by the National Research Council of Thailand (NRCT) to consolidate chemical libraries within nine Thailand universities and create a management system at the national level. This will be combined with the existing Thailand Bioresource Research Center (TBRC) whose broad mission is to manage bioresources and facilitate the coordination of exchange of biological information and resources, and develop mechanisms enabled by information technology to provide access to the scientific community.

Both initiatives are working with TCELS and the Excellent Centre for Drug Discovery [at Mahidol University] for drug discovery from natural products, starting with collaboration with Japanese pharma companies.

The collaboration with Japanese pharma is starting by first concluding shared guidelines for access and benefit sharing of natural bioresources in compliance with the Nagoya Protocol. Capacity building has taken place already by exchange of scientists, now once a year, but will extend to having a collaborative drug discovery project once the guidelines are concluded.

There have apparently been some early discussions with US firms like Genentech around the chemical library?

The concrete collaboration is currently with Japan. We visited Genentech and started some dialogue with the company prior to that. There was an exchange of scientists. We discussed about the chemical library - some form of exchange - but beyond that I cannot say much.

Pricing of medicines and medical devices is a thorny area globally these days. How does the Thailand government hope to maintain the balance of encouraging innovator firms to enter/launch new products/technology and at the same time ensure no major strain on Thailand’s healthcare budget?

It’s a tricky issue. Up to now the government looked at things more from the public health, accessibility and cheap drugs perspective, but starting from this government, we’ve started to realize that we have to change the healthcare sector from behaving as the cost center to become more like a profit center. Of course, that needs innovation. There have to be some investments and trade-offs.

I could think of some sensitive issues like intellectual property [IP]. We have been almost blind to IP protection in the past but now with more government policy towards innovation, we are shifting to give emphasis to IP protection mainly because if you don’t protect your own IP, you can’t do innovation and we know that. So, this is an increasing trend.

On FDA regulation [in Thailand], there’s been pressure to change and some months ago there has been change; we would expect more change - towards more flexibility, openness and efficiency on the [Thai] FDA part and the whole system.

For R&D investment, we have set a clear target as 1% of GDP and the target is next year. Currently we are at 0.6%. You will see a lot of change when we cross the borderline of 1%. The attitude towards IP protection will change, regulation will change.