2021 Taiwan Biotechnology Forum 台灣生物科技論壇

A quick note from personal perspectives

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq5rrPZ8qFU&t=3965s

Overall, this is a great video for summarizing what Taiwan has done in combating COVID-19 and the international efforts in developing therapeutics including antivirals and vaccines.

Seven keynotes in this forum are as follows:

1) Taiwan’s Experience and Preparations for Future Emerging Infectious Diseases (Chien-Jen Chen, Sc.D., Ph.D.)
2) Life Science Industry in Post-COVID-19 Era (Toru Jay Seo, Ph.D)
3) Advancing Full-Brain AI Technologies for Drug Development and Genome Analysis (Ching-Yung Lin, Ph.D.)
4) Real-time Therapeutics Discovery (Philip Tagari, Ph.D.)
5) Innovation and Partnerships in Post-Covid Era (Shaun Grady)
6) A Milestone in the QurE “m.Cov-tainer” in NCKU Campus (Ping-Yen Liu, M.D., Ph.D.)
7) COVID-19 and Human Rights: Taiwan’s Experience (Chang, J.S.D.)

My favorite talk

My favorite talks among all is “Life Science Industry in Post-COVID-19 Era”, delivered by Doctor Toru Jay Seo. The slide, Novel Modalities to Expand Drug Target Space (Figure 1), brought my attention. The numbers shown in the slide are a little crude, but we can tell despite Druggable Genome and Disease Modifying Genome, there is a quite big space among Human Genome which has not been explored or understood. These are what excite and worry scientists, since we have so much to improve yet we also know so little about human bodies. I find this interesting with a class of genes, variants of uncertain significance (VUS), that I read in one review article [1]. This is a potential area in medicine that will hopefully bring life science into new frontiers.

Figure 1. Presentation slide of “Novel Modalities to Expand Drug Target Space” from Keynote 2

Another astonishing point from the talk is how fast and efficient the vaccine was developed, through the efforts between Pfizer and BioNTech. Regarding the speed of vaccine development, I have personal doubts since traditionally, a vaccine takes at least five to ten years to become a safe and efficacious therapeutic agent. As shown in Figure 2, the development time spam of SARS-COV-2 is so much shorter than other vaccines. I remember I was in another talk from one regional leader of clinical trials in Pfizer. She mentioned that in he beginning of the vaccine development collaboration with BioNTech, there was no contract between the two companies. The situation was simply too emergent for a standard business partnership to be formed but the relationship was based on the mutual trust for each other. With workers working day and night, the vaccine was finally approved within eight months. The overall pipeline of drug discovery and development process was shown in Figure 3.

Figure 2. Presentation slide of “Miracle in Vaccine Development” from Keynote 2

Figure 3. Presentation slide of “A vaccine in a year” from Keynote 2

Notably, in Figure 3, the fast design and conduction of clinical trials is impressive. This is not only due to the special regulations in accordance with emergent pandemic, such as requiring less patient sample and study period, but also because of the realization of virtual clinical trials.

Efforts have been done in Taiwan

Keynote 1 (Taiwan’s Experience and Preparations for Future Emerging Infectious Diseases) by Doctor Chien-Jen Chen, Keynote 6 (A Milestone in the QurE “m.Cov-tainer” in NCKU Campus) by Professor Ping-Yen Liu, and Keynote 7 (COVID-19 and Human Rights: Taiwan’s Experience) by Professor Chang, perfectly delineate the efforts from Taiwan government and private sectors.

Keynote 1 summarizes the key actions taken by Taiwan Centers for Disease Control. Several Artificial Intelligence (AI) oriented solutions developed by Taiwan AI Lab were acknowledged in the talk, including Taiwan Social Distancing App, Health Report App, AI SARS-COV-2 Classifier, etc. The talk was concluded with Post-COVID-19 strategies (Figure 4), one of which is Big Health. I am particularly looking forward to “Healthcare regulatory sandbox”. In 2018, the first regulatory sandbox was launched by Singapore Ministry of Health in the domain of telemedicine and mobile medicine. The sandbox program was called Licensing Experimentation and Adaptation Programme (LEAP) and its aim was “to better understand new innovative services by partnering early with industry”. The program has achieved the objectives and will be closing in 2021. A sandbox is a protected, regulated yet innovation-accelerating environment in which technology is utilized to optimize healthcare service quality. It is exciting for Taiwanese healthcare providers, companies and patients to participate in a sandbox experiment, with state-of-the-art technology and high-quality healthcare service.

Figure 4. Presentation slide of “Post-COVID-19 strategy of Economic Development in Taiwan” from Keynote 1

Finally, Keynote 3 beautifully summarizes the devotion of protecting human rights from Taiwan regulatory divisions. The insightful and organized talk from Professor Chang gives a comprehensive view regarding how privacy should be protected and the considerations worth of thinking.

[1] Federici G, Soddu S. Variants of uncertain significance in the era of high-throughput genome sequencing: a lesson from breast and ovary cancers. J Exp Clin Cancer Res. 2020;39(1):46