A vaccine subsidiary of drugmaker Medigen Biotechnology Corp (基亞) yesterday started preliminary construction on a NT$1 billion (US$33.26 million) factory in Hsinchu County, aiming to produce vaccines for enterovirus and influenza starting in 2016.
The planned factory in Hsinchu Biomedical Science Park (新竹生物醫學園區) is to have two production lines to make 10 million vials of vaccines a year after it becomes operational in 2016, according to Medigen Vaccinology Corp (基亞疫苗).
The company developed vaccines for H1N1 influenza and or H5N1 influenza in 2009 and 2010 respectively, and acquired the know-how to produce a vaccine for EV71 enterovirus in 2012.
The company’s H5N1 and EV71 vaccines are expected to enter phase two clinical trails this year and are likely to hit the market in 2016, Medigen Vaccinology said.
The firm is also in talks with the National Health Research Institutes to acquire technology to make the vaccine for H7N9 influenza virus, with plans for pneumonia and cancer vaccines in the long term.
Meanwhile, Ho Shou-chuan (何壽川), chairman of SinoPac Financial Holding Co (永豐金控), which has invested in local biotechnology firms, said yesterday that the market value of local biotechnology companies has reached NT$820 billion (US$27.2 billion) and is likely to exceed NT$1 trillion by the middle of the year.
“Biotechnology will definitely be one of the nation’s most important industries in the next 50 years,” he said at the opening ceremony of a new office for Taiwan Research-Based Biopharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (TRPMA).
CHIP HANG-UP: Surging memorychip prices would deal a blow to smartphone sales this year, potentially hindering one of MediaTek’s biggest sources of revenue MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip designer, yesterday said its new artificial intelligence (AI) chips used in data centers are to account for 20 percent of its total revenue next year, as cloud service providers race to deploy AI infrastructure to meet voracious demand. MediaTek is believed to be developing tensor processing units for Google, which are used in AI applications. While it did not confirm such reports, MediaTek said its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business would be a new growth engine for the company. It again hiked its forecast for the addressable ASIC market to US$70 billion by 2028, compared
Motorists ride past a mural along a street in Varanasi, India, yesterday.
MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s biggest smartphone chip supplier, yesterday said it plans to double investment in data center-related technologies, including advanced packaging and high-speed interconnect technologies, to broaden the new business’ customer and service portfolios. The chip designer is redirecting its resources to data centers, mainly designing application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for cloud service providers. The data center business is forecast to lead growth in the next three years and become the company’s second-biggest revenue source, replacing chips used in smart devices, MediaTek president Joe Chen (陳冠州) told a media event in Taipei. “Three or four years
AT HIGH CAPACITY: Three-month order visibility on stable customer demand would push factory utilization to between 80 and 85 percent, Vanguard’s president said Foundry service provider Vanguard International Semiconductor Corp (世界先進) yesterday said it is unable to fully satisfy surging demand for chips used in artificial intelligence (AI) servers and data centers, amid an AI infrastructure investment boom that is crowding out production of less advanced chips. Vanguard is facing an “undersupply of chips” made using mature process technologies, due to strong demand for AI products and improving demand from customers in the commercial, industrial and auto sectors, which are digesting excess inventory to a healthier level, company chairman Fang Leuh (方略) told a virtual investors’ conference. However, Vanguard gave a more conservative view on
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