BioMed Taiwan

• Healthcare&LifeSciencesReview_Taiwan Report *Download

Taiwan has been featured in the November issue of Scientific American this year, titled “Ready to Disrupt? TAIWAN”. The report highlighted in-depth analysis of Taiwan’s healthcare and life science industry. As the report pointed out in the beginning, it predicted that “the tiny Asian Pacific island of Taiwan standing out proudly among more obviously heavyweight protagonists—such as the United States, Japan, Germany and Switzerland—in staking an audacious claim for the title of lead pioneer to shape the healthcare of tomorrow”. The feature also interviewed ministerial officials, industry leaders and academic researchers to discuss issues such as governmental policies, regulations, capital investments, translational researches, and their impact on the progression of Taiwan’s biomedical industry.

Starting from the top, President Tsai Ing-Wen’s administration has invested tremendous resources in developing biomedical industry as part of the “5+2 Industry Innovative Projects”. The administration has set an ambitious target for the biomedical industry for 2025, under the guidance of the Biomedical Industry Innovative Program (BIIP) encompass reaching an overall production value of above $30 billion USD, the international marketing of 20 new drugs as well as 80 new medical devices. So far, “in the past five years alone, six brand new drugs developed locally in Taiwan have been granted United States FDA approval, while the indigenous medtech industry is booming, having registered an increase of revenue by more than eight percent last year” as recounted by Ministry without Portfolio, Tsung-Tsong Wu. Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, Dar-Bin Hsieh, elaborated that “there is a pressing need to cultivate a new generation of innovative R&D talent as we strive to rewire Taiwan’s industry from original equipment manufacturing and original design manufacturing towards an innovation and knowledge-driven economy and we naturally identify the biomedical industry as central to fulfilling that mission”.

As the global healthcare and life sciences industry is experiencing unprecedented change and renewal, advances in artificial intelligence, digital health, and precision medicine are transforming the “one-size-fits-all” medicine into a “personalized” medicine. A joint effort of government, industry, academia and medical communities, National Biobank Consortium of Taiwan was established. This platform, 31 biobanks in total, has collectively accumulated close to 4.5 million samples and recruited 460,000 participants. Combined with the talents from both ICT and biomedical industry, these big data will be digitized and linked with different types of health information for the application in precision drug development and personalized medicine. More importantly, it will provide international clinical research community a powerful, quicker, more efficient, better quality research tool as we foster global partnerships on the advancement of precision medicine. In this trending healthcare wave, Taiwan has positioned herself perfectly to develop innovative precision technology to improve the overall welfare of the global citizen and lead the rest of the world into the “healthcare of tomorrow”. To learn more about how Taiwan leads the changes in the medicine of tomorrow, please download the report for further reading.

• Healthcare&LifeSciencesReview_Taiwan Report *Download