Featured Stories | Singapore Economic Development Board

CREDIT: Affymetrix

Global Manufacturing Site for Research Instruments

Singapore offers strong engineering capabilities that enable companies to do product reengineering and scale up their manufacturing operations. We have built up a strong base of 30 medical technology manufacturers that employ more than 8,000 skilled workers in Singapore. Today, Singapore is one of the world’s leading manufacturing sites for research tools and diagnostics instruments, supplying more than half of the world’s micro-arrays and 50 per cent of the global demand for Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) instruments. Global leaders such as Affymetrix, Illumina, Applied Biosystems and Bio-Rad have opened world scale manufacturing facilities in Singapore.

CREDIT: Fluidigm

Global Leaders’ Choice Location for R&D

Singapore presents a one-stop location for companies who seek to address regional and global healthcare needs with innovative systems and solutions. Companies are able to tap on innovative ideas from partnerships with public-sector researchers and clinicians, leading technologies provided by global industry leaders and test-bedding infrastructure in hospitals. Global leaders in medical devices have invested in Singapore to develop products that can be customised for the regional and global markets.

Companies such as Becton Dickinson and Siemens Medical Instruments have established corporate R&D centres and are staffed by over 50 researchers. In 2007, Fluidigm and Hill-Rom set up their first Asian R&D facility for research instrumentation and microelectronics/embedded software in hospital beds respectively. DxAssays, a joint venture between Qiagen and Bio*One Capital, also recently opened its molecular diagnostics lab.

CREDIT: ST Microelectronics

CREDIT: Institute of
Bioengineering and
Nanotechnology

Homegrown Innovation

Homegrown companies and research institutes have received global recognition for their innovative research and medical devices. They include HealthSTATS International, Veredus Laboratories and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.

Singapore’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) has succeeded in developing an all-in-one rapid gene diagnosis device that enables polymerase chain reaction (PCR) gene detection within 17 minutes, which is radically faster than conventional laboratory methods. IBN is actively exploring commercialization opportunities for this highly promising product. This device can also be adapted for other infectious diseases such as SARS, HIV and Hepatitis B, by extracting nucleic acids from other body fluids such as blood, urine or saliva. The research was published in Nature Medicine in October 2007. In November 2008, MP Biomedicals signed an agreement with A*Star to commercialise the device.

Veredus Laboratories collaborated with STMicroelectronics to commercialize a breakthrough molecular diagnostics lab-on-chip test kit - VereFlu^TM. This portable device, the size of a fingernail, allows for rapid detection of major influenza types within two hours instead of the weeks required using more traditional methods.

HealthSTATS International was awarded Technology Pioneer 2007 status by the World Economic Forum. The company’s wearable ambulatory blood pressure monitoring medical device, BPro®, is the world’s first device that allows for continuous monitoring and analysis of blood pressure from a remote station over a 24-hour period. This device clinched the Monitoring device of the year award from Frost and Sullivan in 2007. HealthSTATS will be working with Singapore’s Institute of Microelectronics (IME) to develop a second generation of the device with a smaller size and wireless features.