The National Infectious Disease Bank is expected to be completed next year, facilitating Taiwan’s research and international cooperation on epidemic prevention, National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) president Sytwu Huey-kang (司徒惠康) said yesterday.
The NHRI has been constructing the facility to support the development of epidemic-prevention technologies, domestically produced vaccines, diagnostic reagents and new medicines to combat infectious diseases, Sytwu said.
In his Double 10 National Day address, President William Lai (賴清德) said that the project remains on schedule, adding that Taiwan aims to deepen cooperation with other countries in biotechnology.
Photo: Cheng Ming-hsiang, Taipei Times
“Through our program for investment in smart healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship, with a budget of NT$10 billion [US$327.39 million], we will encourage more companies to engage in innovative research and development, expand investment and drive the biomedical industry toward becoming a trillion-New Taiwan-dollar sector — another ‘sacred mountain protecting the nation,’” Lai said.
The idea of building the facility dates back to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when the Ministry of Health and Welfare began considering the need for a centralized biorepository, Sytwu said.
Then-minister of health and welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) first proposed the idea of creating a national platform, to be built by the NHRI, for the systematic collection of biological specimens, such as blood, saliva or mucus for research and development use, Sytwu said.
The NHRI developed the idea and submitted a proposal to the minister in 2020, outlining plans to establish a national database encompassing a wide range of infectious agents, such as bacteria, fungi and viruses, he said.
The bank building is expected to be completed next year, he added.
To address regulatory hurdles, the NHRI and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to establish a mechanism for biomaterial transfer, he added.
Previously, specimens collected by the CDC could only be used for diagnosis, disease prevention and public health control, Sytwu said.
Under the new MOU, such specimens can be legally transferred to the NHRI for wider use in research, including the creation of new medicines, vaccines and rapid test kits he said.
The collaboration would centralize research resources and create a national-level database accessible to academic institutions and the biomedical industry, he added.
Sytwu said the NHRI has officially joined the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC) and the Asian Consortium for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Microbial Resources (ACM).
The WFCC, based in the Netherlands, has nearly 80 member states and more than 100 participating organizations worldwide, while the Japan-based ACM has about 35 member institutions, he said.
Through cooperation with the organizations, Taiwan can share key pathogen data and ensure that its locally collected pathogen strains are included in international preservation systems, he added.
Taiwan would be represented by its national flag in these international platforms and engage in reciprocal cooperation, he said.
That means Taiwan can deposit its endemic bacterial and viral strains into global databases and access foreign pathogen samples to better understand international epidemic trends, he added.
Research on large-scale epidemics would no longer be confined to individual countries, Sytwu said, adding that international data sharing and joint research would be critical for tracking pathogen variations and accelerating the development of vaccines and medicines.
That is a crucial step in Taiwan’s quest for stronger disease prevention resilience, in line with international standards in the post-COVID-19 era, he added.
Additional reporting by CNA
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