Asia-Pacific countries, hoping to get a greater footing in the multi-billion-dollar global biotech market, vow to work more closely together to build their nascent industries at the world's biggest biotech meeting here.
Biotech industry representatives and government officials from Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan tried to woo some of the 14,000 biotech professionals to their countries during a session at the three-day BIO 2002 meeting.
"If you walked around at BIO [2002] and look at all the stands from so many countries and so many regions, you're struck by the difficulty it is to be different," Jim McAllen, an official with New Zealand's biotech firm Genesis.
Although McLean's opening pitch for selling his country as a place to invest biotech dollars was a bit unorthodox, his remarks pinpoint the problem faced by the some 20 countries and 25 US states exhibiting in Toronto's convention center for BIO 2002.
Asia-Pacific countries, trying to develop their nascent industries where resources are limited and markets are smaller, proposed further collaboration within the region to overcome this challenge.
Tony Coulepis, from the Australian Biotechnology Association (AusBiotech), suggested countries form an Asia-Pacific Biotech Federation to advance biotech investment in the region, which now employs some 6,500 biotech professionals.
"Our colleagues are all talking about the same thing. We're all talking about critical mass, joining together in order to be world competitive," Coulepis said.
Other biotech panelists at the session welcomed the plan as the right direction for smaller countries that want to compete against the US biotech powerhouse, whose companies accounted for 72 percent of the public company biotech revenues in 2001.
"I think size is one of the main reasons" for a regional federation, said Boon Swan-foo with Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research.
He said while collaboration between smaller countries and major US biotech firms has increased, a regional biotech federation would help "focus on Asian diseases and see how the biotech drugs would affect the Asian populations."
Johnsee Lee, another panelist with Taiwan-based Industrial Technology Research Institute, agreed.
"We are in support of that idea to form a [regional] federation and the reason is very simple because all these countries in Asia in terms of biotechnology are mostly still in an early stage ... but the potential is large because of the large population," Lee said.
According to Ernst and Young, the Asia-Pacific region is experiencing notable expansion, particularly in Australia, China, India and Singapore.
Japan, whose biotech industry grew 350 percent since 1989, is investing US$2.4 billion in science and technology over five years.
RSS