Singapore's biomedical science sector development strategy: Is it sustainable?

Abstract

This paper outlines the strategic efforts undertaken by Singapore to establish its national capability in the biomedical science sector, reviews the commercial base as a result of these efforts and compares Singapore's approach with the UK and US development models, discusses the challenges that Singapore faces and raises some questions on the long-term sustainability of the sector.

Although Singapore is a small country in terms of geographical size, its economic size is significant, with gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP per capita of US$112bn and US$25,200 respectively in 2002. For the past 40 years, the country has achieved an average annual GDP growth of 8.4 per cent by focusing on manufacturing and productivity improvements. Biotechnology has been earmarked as the next wave of technology that will sustain the country's economic growth. For almost two decades, Singapore has focused its efforts on building capabilities in the biomedical science area to exploit biotechnology and traditional chemistry-based technologies in drug discovery, development and production. The main principle of Singapore's strategy is to locate a sector targeted for growth and then to focus its efforts on building the key pillars to support the sector; identified in this case to be research, early stage funding and specialised infrastructure.