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DIRECTORY OF SINGAPORE PROCESS & CHEMICALS INDUSTRIES 2021/2022
Forging ahead
An island nation with a small domestic market, Singapore has punched above its weight in the pharmaceutical industry.
Since the launch of its Emerging Markets Biotechnology Competitiveness and Investment (BCI) Survey in 2015, research consultancy Pugatch Consilium has put Singapore at the top of the pack. In 2019, the latest available, Singapore scored 87%, ahead of Taiwan’s 80% and Israel’s 75%, among 17 emerging markets surveyed.
“Developing a long-term biopharmaceutical innovation policy that is holistic and consistently implemented means bringing forward pro- innovation reforms in all five BCI policy categories,” the survey report said.
In another report, Building the Bioeconomy (6th edition) that covers National Biotechnology Industry Development Strategies Globally, Pugatch Consilium gave Singapore a score of 80% in its Intellectual Protection Index life sciences indicator. It ranked below Japan and seven Western countries in this category.
Under its “Venture Capital & Private Equity Country Attractiveness Index, Economy
Ranking, 2018”, Singapore scored 90.7 out of 100, trailing only the US, UK, Canada and Japan.
The consultancy’s performance measure directly compares 44 economies’ policy inputs with real-life biotech outputs.
In conversation with Biospectrum Asia, a bio and health sciences media platform, Ms Poh Hwee Tee, Director of Singapore Association of Pharmaceutical Industries (SAPI), noted, “Typically, a country with a small domestic market size like Singapore will face challenges in attracting investors to invest in the country’s pharmaceutical market. Contrary to all expectations, Singapore has managed to create an opportunity to be the centre of excellence for the pharmaceutical industry.”
Ms Poh, who is also Managing Director of Novartis Singapore, attributed the country’s success to its purposeful investment in innovation and its well-established healthcare infrastructure. “The market has high efficiency of adoption for new drugs and therapies, making it very attractive for pharmaceuticals to pilot their new products in Singapore.”
Singapore’s ability to control the pandemic after the unexpected flare up in foreign workers’
dormitories and keep the infection and mortality rates low, have also raised its cachet amongst investors.
Formed in March 1996 following the merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz, Novartis has two manufacturing plants as well as its Asia-Pacific regional headquarters in Singapore employing over 1,000 associates working across divisions covering innovative medicines, generic and biosimilar medicines.
The company is planning to scale up its presence. Said Ms Poh, “One of the areas that we are looking to explore in the Singapore pharmaceutical market is to power breakthrough innovation in cell and gene therapy. Currently, there are three key focus areas for the development of transformative cell and gene therapies at Novartis: AAV-based therapies, CAR-T cell therapies, and CRISPR-based technologies. These technologies can produce breakthroughs and address major unmet needs for patients in the fields of neurology, hematology, ophthalmology, and oncology.”
Also auguring well for Singapore is the investment decisions of both Singapore’s GIC and Temasek Holdings. According to Global SWF, which tracks investments made by over 400 sovereign wealth funds and public pension funds, the GIC was the world’s most active state- owned investor in 2020 with total investments of US$17.7 billion, with strong emphasis on biotech and information technology.
As for Temasek Holdings, its US$2.3 billion investments in 2020 was directed principally at e-commerce and health care and biotechnology. Global SWF said during the year, Temasek made at least 18 investments in health care, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in the United States, China, France, Germany and Singapore.
Among the notable deals are Temasek’s lead in a US$250 million private placement in
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