Speech by Mr Lim Chuan Poh, Chairman of A*STAR, at the 10th Anniversary Gala Dinner for the Experimental Therapeutics Centre (ETC), 9 March, The Canning Room, Raffles City Convention Centre

Prof Alex Matter, CEO of ETC and D3,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Good evening.

First, congratulations to ETC on your 10th Anniversary. Ten years sounds like a long time. However, it may also be how long it takes to demonstrate your capability and productivity.

Singapore launched the Biomedical Sciences (BMS) Initiative in 2000 and Phase I was focused on building basic research capabilities. Phase II was launched in 2006 to build on these basic research capabilities to move into Translational and Clinical Research. ETC was established as part of Phase II.

Let me now share with you how ETC and later on D3 was set up. When we were looking at this in late 2006, the pharma industry was facing low productivity in their drug discovery and development efforts against escalating costs. At the time, it took an average of 15 years and over US$1b to produce a successful drug, and the process has become longer and more expensive since. So, it was almost foolhardy for us to consider doing this in the public sector.

We spoke to many of the pharma companies to seek out partnerships with them to take our early stage discoveries into their translational work. The response was uniformly negative and they told us that they had many early stage discoveries that were left on the shelf and, in fact, welcomed us to take them forward if we wished. On the other hand, they also told us that they would be keen to work with us should we have candidates that have reached early Phase II clinical trials. This left the entire upstream public sector BMS effort here with a significant gap that we called “the Valley of Death”.

Prof Sir David Lane bravely stepped forward to take on the task to close this gap in the form of ETC, the Experimental Therapeutics Centre. This name was coined by Nobel Laureate Dr Sydney Brenner as by then, we already had many research institutes, so ETC is “etcetera, etcetera”.

A few people in this room will remember that we sought PM’s endorsement for this move in June 2007. We made two arguments: first was the need to cross the Valley of Death; second was that by creating such a platform, we would be able train people who could better transit to industry or set up their own biotechs.

ETC began operations in 2007 under Sir David Lane. Prof Alex Matter left Novartis and succeeded David as Chief Executive of ETC in 2009. ETC began work with Duke-NUS Medical School in 2009 on ETC-159. In December 2009, Alex Matter came to see me to propose the setting up of D3 as ETC was only able to take a candidate through to the pre-clinical stage. D3 was established in 2011, and began operations in early 2012, with Alex Matter as the concurrent Chief Executive. By June 2015, six years later, we achieved the first goal when the first patient was successfully dosed with ETC-159. I believe this is fast even by industry standards.

The team has positive indications from Phase 1a of clinical trials for ETC-159, which are still ongoing in Singapore and the USA. Based on this, they hope to advance to Phase 1b trials later this year, testing for actual efficacy of the drug in patients. So, we now not only have the capabilities and resources to cross the Valley of Death, we have demonstrated these capabilities. I think everyone involved in these efforts deserves a big round of applause.

As for the second argument, it is true that ETC has not been training and transiting scientists to industry as fast as we had earlier anticipated. However, this is understandable given the changes in the industry landscape worldwide and therefore also in Singapore. Nonetheless, ETC and D3 are important receptacles of talented and experienced people in a growing and increasingly vibrant biotech ecosystem.

In addition to these public receptacles, there are currently around 15 local drug development biotechs operating in Singapore, and this number is set to grow significantly in the years to come. Notwithstanding the small but growing number, our local biotechs are making waves internationally.  In particular, I would like to highlight ASLAN Pharmaceuticals. They received approval in January this year to list on the Taipei Exchange, the first biotech in Singapore to get approval to IPO in any market. The IPO is likely to take place in the second quarter of this year. ASLAN and A*STAR enjoy close ties, having entered a three-year research collaboration last year after ASLAN licensed A*STAR’s RON immuno-oncology antibody. This antibody was developed by our very own p53 laboratory under the watchful eye of Sir David Lane.

We all know the journey of drug discovery and development is a very complex one.

The whole exercise of ETC-159 involved 3 Ministries (MTI, MOH and MOE), 10 public sector institutions and about an equal number of private contract research organisations and consultants. We are familiar with the adage that “It takes a village to raise a child”. Likewise, for the ETC/D3 effort, it takes a whole community of chemists, biologists, clinicians, process engineers, regulators, and lawyers, “etc”, each with deep expertise and experience, to bring a drug candidate to first in man.

Over the past 10 years, we have built up the core capabilities and systems to bridge the “valley of death” and to catalyse activities in the drug development ecosystem.

We have also nurtured and seeded talent across the entire ecosystem from the public sector into the biotechs, the large pharmaceutical companies, IPOS and also the VCs just to name some of them.

Tonight, I believe all the key partners in this entire discovery to innovation value chain are gathered to celebrate what we have achieved together even as we recognise that the ecosystem is still a very nascent one. So, we are not just celebrating the 10^th Anniversary of ETC, but also the positive catalytic effects that came with the setting up of ETC. This is a most deserving celebration and one that we can all be proud of.

And, we are obviously not going to stop at ETC-159. Tonight, I am privileged to announce that Singapore’s second cancer drug, ETC-206, advanced to first-in-man trials in December last year (2016). ETC-206 targets blood cancers, and was discovered, developed, and brought to Phase 1 trials through the collaborative efforts of ETC, D3, Duke-NUS, and the Singapore Clinical Research Institute (SCRI). Both ETC-159 and ETC-206 are key milestones in Singapore’s biomedical sciences journey. They demonstrate Singapore’s growing drug innovation capabilities – discovering and developing drugs with the potential to improve or save patients’ lives.

As we move forward, our eyes are now set on how we can leverage our drug discovery and development capabilities to better create and capture value, both economic and non-economic, as articulated in the RIE2020 plan. The recent Committee on the Future Economy (CFE) report emphasised the need to strengthen our R&D ecosystem, in order to meet the changing needs of industry for the future economy. This means finding new ways to create value for the economy, such as creating new enterprises and businesses in strategic, innovative clusters. Drug discovery and development is one such strategic cluster in Singapore’s HBMS ecosystem.

For this reason, we will also be setting up the Experimental Biotherapeutics Centre (EBC). This will be another national platform for drug development, the counterpart to ETC/D3 for the biologics drug candidates. Together, ETC, D3, and EBC will constitute an integrated drug development system for Singapore in the public sector.

At the same time, I have already spoken about a small cluster of biotech companies that we can call our own. They will be the natural receptacles for the public sector drug discovery and development efforts and we are seeing early signs of such flows.

The success of the public sector efforts should feed into these biotechs that will in turn stimulate even more successful public sector endeavours and create more biotechs. It is this virtuous spiral that will define the next level of Singapore’s drug innovation ecosystem.

To do this well, we need to continue to foster an innovative and collaborative community. This is an effort that we, all of us here and many who are not present tonight, have been working on for a while. But, there is still a lot more for us to do both in terms of shifting the mind-sets of the people and entities involved and also the systems and structures to facilitate and encourage collaboration and innovation.  We have to keep at this. We are a small community, so we need to focus every bit of our resources and harness every bit of our capabilities to derive the maximum possible synergies for impact. And, we have to do this together to transform this Little Red Dot into Asia’s leading innovative drug discovery and development hub.

To conclude, let me once again extend my heartiest congratulations to Alex Matter and the team in ETC and D3 on your 10th anniversary. I also want to express my deepest appreciation to everyone else who has supported and partnered ETC over the years. Finally, let me wish ETC-159 and 206 continued successes and I look forward to hearing more successful ETC XXX or etceteras in the years ahead.

Thank you very much.