IBM Taiwan kicked off its biotechnology research and development center in Taipei yesterday. It's designed to provide computer solutions and services to accelerate advancements in the life sciences, a company executive said.
The center, located in Nankang Software Park, is the first of its kind in the Asia Pacific region for IBM, said Jason Hsu (
"Development of biotech applications have always depended upon continued access to talent and new technologies. In Taiwan we have seen a rich pool of talent in this field, so what we need is to bring together the development of life sciences with new information technologies," Hsu said.
The center's establishment -- part of IBM's ongoing commitment to support the development of the biotech industry as Hsu put it -- is therefore set to utilize IBM's resources and expertise in areas such as high performance computing, data and storage management.
Hsu declined to specify the investment value of the center, but he did point out that they hope to help link up with over 100 public scientific data networks from around the world within the next three years.
Bill Doak, IBM Asia-Pacific life science executive, said "Big Blue" has chosen to locate the new R&D center in Taiwan instead of China or Singapore, because of Taiwan's good track of record in medical research and its abundant talent pool in the sector.
Moreover, continued support and a firm commitment by the government for the biotech industry also played a key role in the decision, Doak said.
Indeed the government has sought to develop industries that will help sustain the nation's economic growth in the future, just as contract chipmaking did with the government's support done in the past.
The Executive Yuan hopes to see total revenue from the local biotech sector rise to NT$250 billion in 2006 on the back of predicted annual growth of 25 percent over the next five years, said Hsieh Fa-dah (謝發達), vice chairman of Council for Economic Planning and Development.
Hsieh, who also attended yesterday's ceremony, said government also wants to bring in new biotech investment of NT$150 billion and to establish 500 or more biotech companies within the next 10 years, making Taiwan a regional biotech R&D center.
Nevertheless, the government may be expecting too much from an industry which is still in its embryonic stage in Taiwan, said Simon Lin (林誠謙), computing center director at Academia Sinica. "Taiwan just entered this field of study and what we have today is simply a collection of data," he said.
As the collection increases, the procedure of sampling becomes increasingly complicated. What the emerging industries need to focus on is information management and a standardized business process, Lin said. "The bottom line is controlling costs -- otherwise the sector may follow in the footsteps of the dotcom bust and burn up a lot of capital."
According to statistics provided by the Market Intelligence Center, the current scale of Taiwan's biotech industry -- including pharmaceuticals, biotech medicine, biochips, agricultural biotechnology and medical equipment -- is between NT$13 billion and NT$15 billion.
Only a small number of Taiwan-based biotech companies, however, currently use information systems, the center said. Less than 11 percent of all biotech concerns in Taiwan use more than 10 servers. The average annual budget for IT spending at a Taiwan-based biotech company went from NT$2.72 billion to NT$3.22 billion from last year to next year, it said.
Against such a backdrop, IBM's Hsu said the new R&D center in Nankang will allow biotech firms to share and explore grid computing by using Big Blue's expertise in computational biology and parallel computing.
"We hope the center will help create Taiwan's first bio-grids -- computer grids that offer computing, data storage and networking resources for life sciences research through the Internet," he said.
This is the second major grid computing initiative undertaken by IBM in Taiwan, following the launch of the Taiwan Integrated Grid for Education and Research, a collaboration with the National Center for High Performance Computing, under the National Science Council.
That project, started in late July, aims to build a powerful computing grid to support R&D efforts of local industry and academia.
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