杏吧原创

WITH its white walls, matching seats and floor-to-ceiling windows, the bar would not look out of place in London or Sydney. But there鈥檚 something unusual about the clientele. At 2 pm on a Thursday, there are six people around a table. None of them is drinking alcohol, they all have notebooks and they are wearing lab coats.

This is the bar at Chromos, one of the seven buildings of Biopolis, the steel and glass symbol of the Singapore government鈥檚 biomedical dream. Built at a cost of S$500 million (拢160 million), Biopolis is spread over 18.5 hectares of land about 15 minutes鈥� drive from downtown Singapore. It has room for about 2000 researchers in seven buildings, each connected by covered 鈥渟kybridges鈥�. Five of these buildings house the publicly funded biomedical research institutes, while the others are set aside for industry. As well as offices, labs and bars, there are lecture theatres, a multimedia auditorium, a food court selling everything from noodles to German beer, and the Bistro Fabulous, where scientists can sit at tables in the sunshine and talk apoptosis or stem cells over scrambled eggs on toast.

It鈥檚 not all rest and relaxation: construction work on Biopolis as a whole continues apace, while the finishing touches go on Phase One. By the end of this year a childcare centre, a biomedical library and a French restaurant will be in place. More buildings for biomedical companies will start to go up early next year followed by housing for researchers. All of this will bring Biopolis considerably closer to the dream of a self-contained science city.

Singapore鈥檚 much-heralded big push into biomedical sciences started for real in 2000, with S$3 billion allocated over five years in addition to the cost of Biopolis. The aim was to make biomedicine the fourth pillar of the economy alongside electronics, chemicals and engineering. In the past 12 months alone, a slew of international joint ventures has been announced; some of the world鈥檚 top biomedical researchers have been tempted with promises of unrivalled access to the funds, facilities and support they need 鈥� and Biopolis has opened its doors.

鈥淭he opening of Biopolis is very, very significant for us,鈥� says Kong Hwai Loong, an oncologist and executive director of the Biomedical Research Council (BMRC), part of the government鈥檚 Agency for Science Technology and Research (A^*STAR).

The initial focus of the biomedical plan was to create a solid base of research talent and capability. And that is still a priority, but compared with 2003, there is a discernible shift towards translating medical research into treatments and commercial applications. This is having an impact on the sort of researchers Singapore wants to attract and on the international deals it is seeking out. After a few years of breathtaking expansion, Singapore is becoming more selective about its development. 鈥淏iopolis represents a comfortable portfolio of basic research capabilities, so we are now asking ourselves, what do we really need to add? We no longer cast our net wide,鈥� says Kong.

This approach extends to the private companies that A^*STAR wants to occupy those designer offices and labs. There has been more demand for space than is available, Kong says, and a new committee is busy deciding which companies best complement existing tenants.

Among those tenants is the Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases, which opened up shop in Singapore in 2003 and moved into Biopolis in July. The NITD is plugging into the country鈥檚 strengths in infectious disease research by concentrating on developing new treatments for dengue fever and tuberculosis. On another floor is Paradigm Therapeutics, which plans to extend the genomics-driven research on the central nervous system and metabolic diseases that it does at its UK home in Cambridge.

Apart from Ian Gray, Paradigm Singapore鈥檚 director of research, there are five researchers at Biopolis, with another three being trained in the UK. When Biopolis鈥檚 animal house is fully operational, the company intends to recruit more staff. The research animals are to be housed in a vast complex in the basement. When complete it will boast a wide range of shared facilities offering everything from glassware washing and lab supplies to DNA sequencing and X-ray crystallography. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a whole host of shared facilities that we wouldn鈥檛 have been able to resource ourselves,鈥� Gray says.

But it wasn鈥檛 just the facilities at Biopolis that attracted Paradigm. In a science city, collaborating with academic researchers and other companies is a breeze, and potential research funding from Japanese pharmaceutical firms is a lure. It鈥檚 a two-way street, of course. From the Singapore government鈥檚 point of view, Paradigm was a desirable Biopolis tenant because of its expertise in an area in which the country would like to be a world player. 鈥淲e want to make sure there are certain capabilities in Singapore,鈥� says Beh Swan Gin, a medical doctor and head of the biomedical sciences section of the government鈥檚 Economic Development Board. 鈥淚f, say, Paradigm comes here and does high-throughput animal model development, that area becomes a capability in Singapore.鈥�

ES Cell International was another obvious choice for Biopolis. Along with cancer and infectious disease studies, embryonic (and adult) stem cell research is a must-have for the BMRC. Alan Colman, chief scientific officer at ES Cell International and a co-creator of Dolly the sheep, came to Singapore in 2002 in large part because the government was willing to invest in the company. 鈥淭here was finance available here which was quite frankly impossible to get elsewhere,鈥� he says.

Singapore also has a solid history of breakthrough stem cell work. In 1994, for instance, a group led by Ariff Bongso of the state鈥檚 National University Hospital was the first to successfully isolate embryonic stem cells, and Patrick Tan of the Singapore General Hospital has pioneered transplants of blood-forming stem cells from bone marrow to treat diseases such as aplastic anaemia.

And as well as actively encouraging stem cell research, Singapore is 鈥減ermissive鈥� compared with countries such as the US. Legislation very similar to that in the UK, which allows stem cells to be extracted from cloned embryos up to 14 days old, was passed by parliament on 2 September. Though until then, says Colman, 鈥減eople assumed that these rules and regulations were already in existence鈥�. He hopes that within a year his team will be able to cure diabetic animals using stem cells that develop into insulin-producing islet cells. And for basic research to support this work, Colman can call not only on his own team but on publicly funded researchers. A fifth of Colman鈥檚 salary is paid by the new Centre for Molecular Medicine, set up to translate research into treatments.

The first of the CMM鈥檚 research groups works on regenerative medicine, looking at how stem cells might treat spinal injury patients. Colman is a senior scientist at the centre, and the group has 10 posts to fill. He is hoping to help CMM fill those posts, and the quid pro quo for the company is that the areas he is nurturing, and which the Singaporean government is paying for, are of interest to ES Cell.

Over at the Institute for Molecular and Cell Biology, the oldest of the five public biomedical research institutes, stem cells are also central. Australians Victor Nurcombe and Simon Cool joined the IMCB last year after being poached from the University of Queensland to expand the institute鈥檚 work using stem cells to aid wound healing.

The government鈥檚 desire to get a return on its biomedical investment is clear in the pair鈥檚 appointments. 鈥淭he institute was looking at recruiting people who were explicitly trying to bridge the theoretical and practical gap,鈥� says Nurcombe. 鈥淎t Queensland we had a mature technology and some terrific preliminary data. The push into applications was a natural one. And the institute鈥檚 attitude is: make this happen, and as fast as you can. Australia also wants that, but has very little in the way of infrastructure to help researchers achieve it.鈥�

A^*STAR has teams of people who are making sure that the all-important intellectual property rights are watertight, advising researchers about commercialisation and providing seed funding for new companies. Nurcombe and Cool say they have been assured of sufficiently high levels of funding and experienced staff to allow their lab to continue forging ahead while they think up and plan commercial applications. So far they haven鈥檛 even been given a budget limit. 鈥淚鈥檓 sure one day there will be a limit, but in this set-up phase it has been case of what we have needed we鈥檝e got,鈥� laughs Nurcombe. 鈥淲e haven鈥檛 had a barrier to what we need yet. And that is as close to scientific heaven as you are ever going to get.鈥�

And all this access to cutting-edge facilities, researchers with complementary expertise and apparently unlimited cash has attracted some of the world鈥檚 top biomedical names. Edison Liu, a former director of clinical sciences at the US National Cancer Institute, was appointed head of Singapore鈥檚 Genome Institute in 2001. In August this year David Lane, one of the scientists credited with discovering the cancer gene p53, and the second most highly cited medical scientist in the UK in the past decade, announced he would be taking a two-year sabbatical from the University of Dundee to head the IMCB.

This month Australian Ian McNiece is leaving his job as professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, to head the new Johns Hopkins Singapore biomedical division in Biopolis. And Axel Ullrich of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, has moved out to lead the Singapore Onco Genome Laboratory at Biopolis, a joint venture between the Max Planck Society and A^*STAR.

鈥淲hat we want to do requires a lot of work, a lot of state-of-the-art instrumentation and a lot of money,鈥� says Ullrich. 鈥淭his would not have been available at Max Planck 鈥� at least not as quickly. It would have taken several years for me to set up something comparable and I鈥檓 not even sure if it would ever have been funded at the rate that we expect to be funded here.鈥� That rate is still being discussed, but Ullrich says he is confident that A^*STAR will be as good as its word.

Ullrich, who has developed drugs to treat diabetes and breast cancer, is among the top 10 most-cited scientists in the world over the past 25 years. He has been on the BMRC鈥檚 International Advisory Council since its launch in 2000. This council of 13 world-class researchers provided Singapore with its masterplan for transforming the country into a biomedical hub. It is now co-chaired by Richard Sykes, rector of Imperial College London and former chairman of GlaxoSmithKline, and Sydney Brenner of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

In 2000, four months after the council鈥檚 first meeting, Ullrich remembers how members of the IAC were surprised to see architectural designs and finished plans for the city of Biopolis. 鈥淭hat is unique to Singapore, I think. The way from an initial idea to a finished product is extremely short and fast.鈥�

That speed is possible because of the way Singapore鈥檚 government operates. Parliament only has one house, government ministers have strong executive powers and there is almost no room for public debate. If the government wants what you want 鈥� and they want biomedical scientists in spades 鈥� the benefits are clear.

This ruthless determination impressed Jackie Ying, who was the youngest-ever tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 she was recruited to head the A^*STAR Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. 鈥淚 was a professor at MIT for 12 years, and they do have focused research centres and institutes, but this is on a much bigger scale and it鈥檚 being done in a very coordinated way,鈥� she says.

Ying says she saw a way to make an impact that would have been impossible at MIT. The aim of the institute is to bring together a wide range of expertise, including mechanical, electrical, chemical and biological engineers, chemists, physicists, biologists, pharmacists, doctors, dentists and materials scientists. 鈥淚f you go to parts of Europe or the US, you will see people working on bioengineering and a lot of people doing nanotechnology, but here we are focused at the interface, and I think that鈥檚 what makes us unique,鈥� she says.

The institute has about 120 staff and PhD students from the world鈥檚 top universities, about half the planned number. Among other things, these researchers are working on using nano-composites to create tissue scaffolds to which proteins and cells will stick. The hope is that these will allow blood vessels to grow through them while providing mechanical robustness. 鈥淭o do that, you really have to cut through all the different research landscapes,鈥� Ying says.

Like heads of other publicly funded research institutes, Ying talks about the importance of commercialisation. None of the institutes has been set goals 鈥� whether it is for intellectual property or physical products. But the message is clear: Singapore will foster and develop basic biomedical research, but commercialisation is 鈥渟trongly encouraged鈥�.

For researchers like Nurcombe and Cool, this is good news. They want to develop new treatments, they are not averse to making money and they like Biopolis and Singapore 鈥� though Cool does miss the Queensland surf.

Ying, who spent some of her childhood in Singapore, is also enjoying life in the state. It鈥檚 an easy place to live, she says, and with cheap, high-quality childcare it鈥檚 a good place to be a working mother. With a broad programme for inviting visiting scientists and holding international conferences and seminars she doesn鈥檛 feel she has to go to the US to keep up to date with work in her field.

If there is anything that Singapore doesn鈥檛 have that some other biomedical hotspots do, she says, it鈥檚 a vibrant biotech sector. 鈥淲e have a lot of multinationals, but we don鈥檛 have a lot of small and medium industries here. That鈥檚 what makes San Francisco and Boston exciting 鈥� they are biomedical hubs. But the government does have all this in mind,鈥� says Ying.

And while it remains to be seen if a country really can create a successful biotech sector from scratch rather than watching one evolve, some are betting on success. Guy Heathers, a British expat and acting director of the biotech industry group BioSingapore, says: 鈥淭he need to succeed is so great in biotech that I think it will happen. Singapore has put so much emphasis on the biomedical sector as the fourth pillar of the economy that failure is not an option.鈥�