Asia's biotechnology industry is in its nascent stage with a high degree of diversity across the region as efforts put in reflect the respective local market's economic and social priorities. These priorities could be fulfilling a need to increase agricultural yields, developing biopharmaceuticals to treat diseases in an ageing population, or simply improving quality and innovation to maintain a place in the increasingly competitive and diverse global marketplace.
In contrast to the geographically diverse focus areas and varying stages of evolution of the biotechnology in the region, a common theme runs across the countries through their continued dependence on alliances and imported technologies to access the latest advances in the industry. This dependence on imported technologies and alliances has resulted in a high profit skew towards the US and EU, which together hold approximately 90% of the industry's profit share in comparison to a 3.3% pie share for Asia Pacific.
But with a potent cocktail of political will, global drivers from the post genomic era and in situ funding, the prospects are huge.
Promotion of Biotechnology in the Asian Countries
Currently South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China, and India are the only Asian countries with a recognized biotechnology capability. Almost all of these countries are using a range of policy instruments to support and promote development of the biotechnology industry. At the heart of these policies is typically a desire to develop in-country capacity. With biotechnology plans setting ambitious targets for industry growth, critical factors defining their success will include developing the infrastructure to support research and its commercialization, or by targeting specific sectors.
South Korea, for example, has set a target for advanced industry capabilities by 2010 having identified key sectors for development and growth - genetic engineering, proteomics, bioinformatics and disease treatments.
Click here to view Key Govt. Initiatives in Korea
Singapore, which is combining a strong skill development program with incentives for inward investment by foreign firms, has identified four key areas for structural improvement and better links between researchers and industry. It has perhaps a more coherent strategy than most others, but this is also largely aided by its size.
Click here to view Key Govt. Initiatives in Singapore
Taiwan's medical biotechnology industry began in 1984 with the Government funding the establishment of qualified laboratories to run recombinant DNA technology experiments. Today it has plans for a number of investment projects including science-based industrial parks, research incentives and a combination of public and private funding.
Click here to view Key Govt. Initiatives in Taiwan
China began developing its biotechnology industry with a focus on plant genomics, transgenic technology. It was the only country from Asia that participated in the human genome project and is now shoring up its genome sequencing capability to facilitate the sequencing of microbial genomes. While the Government wants the biotech industry to become a key driver for its future economic and social development, priorities will be oriented to meet the nutritional needs and agricultural applications in the country.
Click here to view Key Govt. Initiatives in China
India was amongst the front runners in biotechnology initiatives in agriculture and now increasingly has seen interest in the field of medical biotechnology from the private sector with quite a few players vying the biopharmaceuticals and biogeneric markets in the world. With most of the pharmaceutical companies establishing biotechnology as an integral part of their business strategy in the near future, and acquiring or developing expertise in select technologies such as recombinant DNA, the country is a strong contender for the biopharmaceutical / biogenerics market. However the nation is yet to consolidate one-off state level policies such as those formalized in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh into a single unified national biotechnology policy with clearly stated focus areas.
Click here to view Key Govt. Initiatives in India
Opportunities and Leverages
Given the initiatives through government and private participation, individual country level capabilities being incubated in the region, the prospects are immense but clearly define only a couple of applications as winning opportunities - agricultural applications and biopharmaceuticals.
Within applications of biotechnology in Asian agriculture, several features confer comparative advantages to the region.
- The richness of biological and ecosystem diversity.
- Presence of skilled resources and scientific capabilities couple with existing and planned infrastructure for undertaking biotechnological research and development in this field.
- In most Asian countries the agricultural biomass resources of plant, animal, fish or tree origin, can provide vast opportunities for preparing value-added products.
Biotechnology is already being applied to increasing yield in the region by
(i) Minimizing pre- and post-harvest losses
(ii) Increasing actual yields closer to the current production potential; and
(iii) Increasing the production potential.
Examples include the use of in-vitro culture techniques in potatoes, cassava and plantation crops, haploids in rice, diagnostic kits for disease identification, new and recombinant vaccines and embryo transfer. Other examples are, transgenic fish through chromosome set manipulation for polyploidy induction, and improved breeding induction and hypophysation, hybridization, for example, of catfish, use of probiotics in feed and fish pond and fish health management.
In some countries in the region, commercial production of transgenic cotton and soybean is increasing fast. These techniques provide opportunities for refining, standardization and efforts to increase cost-effectiveness to improve their transfer to and adoption by the majority of small farmers.
Biotherapeutics or applications in medical biotechnology would inarguably be the more lucrative winning option for Asian countries but with equally high entry barriers and investment needs. With the region's emergence as a preferred manufacturing base for bulk drugs and pharmaceutical dosage forms, and also clinical development; it would be a natural progression for extending these capabilities in chemistry into biology and providing the same platform for revenue generation. The potential is magnified further by the biopharmaceutical industry's contrasting dynamics reflected in the intensity of developmental activity, richer research pipeline and greater expected therapeutic efficacy of clinical candidates for the current disease load of the world such as oncology, and lifestyle diseases.
Capitalizing the opportunities in this sector specifically from a manufacturing expertise approach would also need development of capabilities in advanced technologies being explored around the world. These emerging manufacturing advances are predominantly worked on to combat the capacity crunch expected to affect the industry with the progression of scores of biotech clinical candidates towards commercial manufacture. Such technologies include -
- Phytopharming or plant factories for biopharmaceutical manufacturing - the technology is not essentially new but has been refined over the past 16 years to harness the considerable abilities of transgenic plants to produce human biopharmaceuticals. Researchers have already demonstrated that recombinant proteins made in plants have similar biological activity as those produced in mammalian, yeast or bacterial cell culture. Moreover, a handful of candidates are into human clinical trials, where initial results have shown efficacy and safety.
- Edible biotherapeutics (edible vaccines) - an example of this concept is the edible Hepatitis - B vaccine developed in potatoes at the Arizona State University. The putative vaccine is produced in the potato's flesh, which is to be eaten raw.
Considering the current level of capabilities across Asia one can see that major opportunity lies in agricultural and biopharmaceutical applications - both catering to the regions internal needs. This will provide an ideal platform to service other regions for capacity crunches and multi-tasking of projects through outsourcing to Asia thereby providing a gateway to increasing its industry profit share from 3.3% to beyond.
- (The author is Director, Healthcare Practice, Frost & Sullivan India. She can be contacted through:sdedhia@frost.com)