Singapore
Stem-cell research
The city gets a little 'help' from USA. Wayne Arnold. NY Times.
Aug 17, 2006

Singapore - You can't buy Wrigley's Spearmint gum in Singapore. But human embryonic stem cells? That's a different matter.

Last month a local business, ES Cell International, claimed to be the first company to produce human embryonic stem cell lines commercially in a way that made them suitable for clinical tests.

Researchers can buy vials of stem cells online from ES Cell for $6,000 each.

Singapore, conservative on most social issues - including a ban on most types of chewing gum - is emerging as a hotbed of stem cell research, thanks to liberal laws in that field and equally liberal government financing.

Lately the tiny island state's ambition of joining the ranks of Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area as a biotechnology hub has been getting a hand from an unexpected quarter: the White House.

Bush administration policies that restrict US government money for stem cell research have prompted an increasing number of top scientists to pack their bags and head for this equatorial city.

Two of the most prominent American cancer researchers, Neal Copeland and Nancy Jenkins, are planning to arrive here next month to take posts at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Singapore.

The husband and wife team, who worked for 20 years at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, said politics and budget cuts had left financing in the United States too hard to come by.

"We wanted to be in a place where they are excited by science and things are moving upward," Copeland said.

Scientists say President George W. Bush's veto last month of legislation to raise limits on government financing for stem cell research was the latest in a series of setbacks, which they say are stifling the research environment and eroding the edge in basic medical science the US has held since World War II.

Shrinking research grants, a greater corporate emphasis on quick profits and the political firestorm over stem cells have left many American scientists frustrated and discouraged.

Waiting in the wings with encouragement and cash is authoritarian Singapore, which has begun to earn a reputation as a haven for biomedical freedom.

The motive is economic. Faced with declining returns in electronics, the industry that vaulted Singapore into the ranks of the world's richest countries, Singapore in 2000 began an initiative to become a leader in biotechnology.

Biotechnology joins a widening portfolio of industries that Singapore is promoting to provide new sources of growth.

It is rapidly becoming a major center for private banking, for example, and it plans to build two of the world's most expensive casino resorts in a bid to bolster its tourism industry.

Using the same combination of tax holidays and incentives that made it a base for the world's biggest electronics makers, Singapore has already managed to lure big drug companies.

Factories pumping out pharmaceuticals for Merck, Pfizer and Schering Plough now generate about S$18b, or US$11.4b, in annual revenue, and account for 5 percent of the Singapore economy.

But Singapore wants companies to do more than make drugs here. To persuade them to conduct basic drug research and development as well, Singapore offered to pay as much as 30 percent of their building costs.

At least 30 companies have responded, including the Swiss company Novartis, which has opened an institute to develop drugs to fight tuberculosis and the tropical dengue virus.

The centerpiece of Singapore's biotechnology effort is the 500 million dollar Biopolis - a seven-building biomedical hive that opened in late 2003.

It is outfitted with the latest high-technology equipment and features a bar, a day care center and an underground facility designed to house a quarter-million laboratory mice.

The authorities are now building a stem cell bank at Biopolis, which will be able to count on some of the world's most liberal laws on human embryonic cell use.

Researchers hope that stem cells, the all-purpose building blocks that eventually turn into specific tissue like bone, muscle or nerves, can be harnessed and used to treat injuries or medical defects.

Scientists have found that stem cells from embryos have a greater flexibility and shelf life than those in adults.

Bush administration opposition to stem cell research is based on the argument that it requires destroying embryos, each of which potentially represents a human life.

Singapore allows stem cells to be taken from aborted fetuses or discarded embryos, and these embryos can be cloned and kept for as long as 14 days to produce stem cells.

Singapore officials say they have spent S$1.5b on biotechnology since 2000 and have budgeted an additional $1.44b over the next five years to finance development of new therapies and drugs.

That is not much compared with the approximately $27b the National Institutes of Health spends each year. But it is spread among a much smaller crowd.

While scientists working for government research institutions here say they are warned not to talk about money, they readily acknowledge that Singapore's salaries exceed those they could earn in the US.

Lavish salaries and lofty titles have helped Singapore staff Biopolis with a roster of foreign luminaries.

In 2001, the same year Bush first imposed limits on stem cell financing, Singapore recruited the National Cancer Institute researcher Edison Liu Tak-Bun.

In 2003, Singapore lured Jackie Ying from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she had become its youngest-ever tenured professor, to head its Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at Biopolis.

This year, Singapore attracted another pair of Americans, the dean of the University of California at San Diego's school of medicine, Edward Holmes, and his wife, Judith Swain.

Swain was the school's dean of translational medicine - the specialty of turning laboratory discoveries into practical drugs or therapies.

Singapore has not limited its recruiting to the United States.

The same year Liu came to Singapore, the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology imported the cancer researcher Yoshiaki Ito, who at the age of 63 was facing forced retirement from Kyoto University in Japan.

In 2004, the British cancer expert David Lane, renowned for his discovery of the "p53" tumor-suppressing gene and for his warnings that financing shortages would lead to a British brain drain, announced that he, too, would move to Biopolis.

He is now the executive director of its cell biology institute.

Probably the best-known of Singapore's imports was also one of its first - Alan Colman, who helped clone Dolly the sheep in 1996.

Unable to find backers willing to wait for his research on diabetes to pay off, he found a ready investor in Singapore's Economic Development Board, which helped finance ES Cell with a group of Australian investors.

"In Singapore, they want a return on investment in the long term," said Colman, now ES Cell's chief executive.

"That's why I came: I could get hold of the money to do the work in a commercial environment that I couldn't do in the US or the UK."

ES Cell is hoping sales of its cell lines can help pay for its own research into finding stem-cell treatments for diabetes and heart disease.
New York Times