The Bio Taiwan expo attracted 20 percent more exhibitors this year than last year, with some firms focusing on the emerging field of precision medicine, the event organizers said at a news conference yesterday.
About 630 companies are set to showcase their latest products and services during the event, to be held at the Taipei World Trade Center’s Nangang Exhibition Hall, from Wednesday next week through July 26, organizers said.
“This year’s focus is to be placed on capturing the potential opportunities of the Precision Medicine Initiative that was launched by US President Barack Obama in January,” Development Center for Biotechnology (DCB, 台灣生物產業發展協會) honorary chairman Johnsee Lee (李鍾熙) said.
The Precision Medicine Initiative is a research effort aimed at improving the efficiency of treatments by providing the information and tools to enable the provision of medical care customized to the needs of individual patients.
Bionet Group (訊聯生技集團), best known for its cord blood bank business, unveiled a non-intrusive chromosome screening solution that can detect genetic predispositions to disease and facilitate early preventative measures.
Vita Genomics Inc (賽亞基因科技), Taiwan’s largest genomics-based biotechnological and biopharmaceutical company, said that it is offering a one-stop solution for customized personal medical care.
Clients would undergo a variety of genomic analysis to determine an ideal treatment plan for diseases or to achieve the desired cosmetic results.
“We also hope to promote greater collaboration with the nation’s information technology sector,” Lee said.
The efforts of Taiwanese firms to develop botanical drug products are also on show at the Bio Taiwan expo.
Founded earlier this year by the DCB, the Botanical Drug Development Consortium has been joined by several companies and has more than 120 researchers and experts among its members.
Two of the consortium’s companies are scheduled to submit investigational new drug applications to the US Food and Drug Administration in February next year.
According to BCC Research, the global market for botanical drug products in 2012 was worth US$22.1 billion, and that figure is expected to grow to US$26.6 billion by 2017.
The consortium hopes to focus on the emerging field of botanical drug products by running clinical trials on Chinese medicinal products, so that the effectiveness of traditional treatments can be judged by mainstream science, it said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained