David Brill
Around S$180 million is to be invested in medical research in Singapore over the next five years in a joint initiative by the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).
Oncology, retinal imaging and cognitive neuroscience are the main fields to benefit from the creation of two new award schemes, which are intended to bridge the gap between scientific research and clinicalpractice.
Speaking at a recent award ceremony, MOH permanent secretary Yong Ying-I described the program as “an important phase in our efforts to nurture a core group of clinician-scientists who will take our biomedical sciences initiative to the next level.”
The Singapore Translational Research Investigator Award (STaR) is the top award in the program. Recipients receive a research grant of up to S$1 million each year for 5 years, as well as complete salary funding and a one-off start-up sum.
Professor David Virshup, director of the Program in Cancer and Stem Cell Biology at the Duke-NUS graduate medical school, is one of four inaugural STaR awardees. His laboratory has been awarded the full S$1 million-a-year, and will be focusing on studying the signaling pathways that are involved in the proliferation of cancer stem cells.
“Having this award allows us to lure back to Singapore people who were getting funded elsewhere. Now that the funding is good here, people like to do their research here,” he said, noting that his research group includes recently-returned Singaporeans who had trained in the US and Canada.
Virshup added that the awards are important for helping practicing physicians to further their research careers.
“If they’re working too hard in the clinic they can’t get any research done. This sort of funding is designed to free-up their time and [help them] to recognize the importance of turning off the beeper, going into the lab and thinking differently for a while, and to take that clinical experience and turn it into a knowledge advance,” he said.
The second type of award is the Clinician Scientist Award (CSA) – a revamped version of the Clinician Scientist Investigator Award that was launched in 2004. The new scheme provides full salary support through the recipient’s institution, whereas the previous system only funded 70 percent of their salary.
Chng Wee Joo, a CSA winner, was working at the Mayo Clinic, US, until last year. He was offered a position to stay on but chose instead to pursue his research in Singapore, feeling that the opportunity to return was “equally attractive.”
“This is a really exciting time for a young researcher like me to come back,” said Chng, who is currently a consultant in the hematology and oncology department at National University Hospital and an associate professor in the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore, where he is researching multiple myeloma and the role of genes that cause the condition to become malignant.
Applications for the new awards were invited around a year ago. The proposals underwent an international peer review process before being reviewed by a biomedical sciences executive committee, which assessed the projects on both their scientific merit and their relevance to Singapore.
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