NUS to receive $3.5 million oncology funding boost

Medical Tribune December 2008 SFIII
David Brill

Singapore’s rapidly-expanding cancer research field has received a further boost with the recent signing of a $3.5 million deal for translational research.

The agreement will see the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine embark on three joint projects with Bayer Schering Pharma, the Germany-based pharmaceutical company.

One of the aims is to profile new cancer drugs within Asian populations, where certain types dominate in comparison to the West.

The deal with NUS is just the first stage of a larger project for Bayer, which intends to invest S$20 million over the next 6 years in research and development in Singapore.

The focus of the present deal is on gastric, liver and lung cancer, but future projects could extend to other cancer types, said Associate Professor Manuel Salto-Tellez, assistant dean of research at NUS.

"We are very proud of this collaboration and believe that the partnership will have significant benefits for patients, academia and industry alike," he said.

"Some of the drugs that are currently with patients have taken up to 20 years to
be developed. By linking with industry in this way we’ll be able to make this process faster. What we are doing is at the core of what our institution is supposed to do, which is to serve patients better."

The project also seeks to identify new predictive biomarkers and to study new clinically-relevant tumor models.

Oncology research in Singapore is booming, with collaborations between academia and industry apparently on the rise. Another deal, signed in August, will see AstraZeneca provide promising new compounds for clinical and preclinical trials at National University Hospital and the National Cancer Centre Singapore.

"We are facing a big problem because cancer is one of the biggest killers in Singapore and the incidence continues to rise," said Salto-Tellez.

"Soon it’s going to develop into an extraordinary contradiction where the majority of cancer patients will come from Asian countries, yet the knowledge of the patients and how to treat them will be based on the results from other parts of the world and other ethnicities. Thus we cannot overemphasize how important it is to build clinical and scientific knowledge in Asia that will be directly and immediately applicable to Asians," he said.