It gives me great pleasure to join all of you today for the official opening of the Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Technology Centre cGMP facility, a state-of-the-art facility for manufacturing protein-derived therapeutics. This facility, which conforms to current Good Manufacturing Practice, is the first of its kind in Singapore, and took four years to build from conceptual design to validation.

Singapore is building up the Biomedical Sciences as an important growth industry for the manufacturing sector. Over the years, we have seen increasing investments in Singapore by pharmaceutical companies such as Aventis, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Schering-Plough, Pfizer and Wyeth. These companies manufacture mainly chemical-derived pharmaceutical drugs. Globally, the industry anticipates that biopharmaceuticals, that is, protein-derived drugs manufactured using biotechnology, will be the next wave of drugs to reach the healthcare market. These new drugs will greatly improve our quality of life.

Already, biopharmaceutical drugs like Epogen and Neupogen, produced and marketed by Amgen and Johnson & Johnson, are blockbusters with sales of over US$1 billion annually. There are now some 95 such drugs already approved and available to patients worldwide. There are another 350 or more biopharmaceutical drugs currently in various phases of clinical testing or under review by the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA).

By tapping this growing global market, Singapore will diversify its base of pharmaceutical manufacturing activities and cover the production of both chemical-derived drugs and biopharmaceuticals. We also intend to nurture a spectrum of manufacturing activities from the production of bulk active ingredients and process development to formulation and finishing. Schering-Plough recently opened its biotechnology plant, which carries out the finishing steps for two new biopharmaceutical drugs.

The Bioprocessing Technology Center (BTC) was established in 1990 with the mission to develop manpower capabilities and cutting-edge technologies for the bioprocessing industry. It is currently organised into two divisions: the Bioprocessing Technology Development Division, or BTD, and the Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Technology Centre, or BMTC. It has a staff of 140 of which 90 are research scientists and engineers^**.

High value-added activities carried out at BTC will create good jobs for Singaporeans. To meet the demand for such skilled jobs, Singapore needs to build up a pool of trained talent for the biopharmaceutical sector.

BTC is therefore collaborating with NUS to train undergraduate, Masters and Ph.D students. The newly-launched A*STAR Graduate Scholarship provides another platform to train specialised manpower.

To enhance its capabilities further, BMTC has recently signed an agreement with Inhibitex Inc to collaborate in research. Both parties will jointly develop processes to produce humanised monoclonal antibodies for the treatment of bacterial infection. These processes will make use of state-of-the-art cell culture and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies.

The BMTC cGMP plant that we will tour in a short while is built to meet the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and EU regulatory standards. This is the first biopharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Southeast Asia. This 70,000 sq ft biopharmaceutical cGMP production facility is capable of manufacturing up to 200 litres of clinical-grade biopharmaceuticals for Phase One and Two clinical trials.

As biopharmaceuticals become more important, I hope that other companies will also want to work with BMTC in Singapore.

I congratulate the Bioprocessing Technology Centre and its Scientific Advisory Board for bringing this first project to fruition. It is an important breakthrough for us. It is now my pleasant duty to declare the BMTC facility officially open.

*****