TCELS promotes life science startups to seize the opportunity of healthcare growth due to Covid-19 pandemic, synergizing with FDA, research unit and capital sources for medicine and health development.
Dr. Nares Damrongchai. CEO, Thailand Center of Excellence for Life Sciences (TCELS) said TCELS has been promoting life science startups for three years to creating a new economy through a collaboration of regulator, capital market, academic institutes and research body.
The “Life Sci. Level Up Challenge 2020” program is an essential way for promotion and incubation of medicine and healthtech startups and researchers. This year, there are 27 teams, selected from 40 teams, who are entrepreneurs or researchers with more than a year experience.
The program aims to develop potential of life science researchers and startups in specific area such as biotech, pharmaceutical, medical devices, diagnostics, cosmetics and supplement food, and digital health IT together with knowledge and skills in business, marketing and laws.
After the training, from now to August, all the 27 teams will join the “Demo Day: Life Sci. Level up Challenge 2020” in mid-September. The final five teams will have a chance to win the prize totally 300,000 baht and meet investor network.
Varit Intrama, Director of Industry and Investment Strategy Department, Thailand Center of Excellence for Life Sciences (Public Organization) noted that medicine health trend will cover preventive treatment, regenerative medicine, stem cells, organ synthesis, health monitoring, and personalized medicine. Thailand must be very focus, by applying data science, IT and artificial intelligence (AI) add on life science making personalized medicine.
To create the personalized medicine, it requires three data modes for nutrition science: gene, behavior, and lifestyles. The nutrition and dietetics help reduce health risk.
Pongpiti Ektheinchai Vice President at The Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) talked about the outlook of startup ecosystem in Thailand that there are more than 1,700 startup companies, 50 venture capitals and 400 angel investors, 8 billion baht grants, 60 billion baht financial loans by which more than 30 billion baht have already granted to startups.
SET’s website www.live-platforms.com providing education platform for startups, will be a channel for raising funds and trading for SMEs and startups in the future.
Thailand is strong in health industry, and it has a business opportunity once AI is applied for personalized healthcare and wellbeing for senior citizen, it needs not to be deep tech, but a new business model that can create revenue. A successful startup can be up-scaling or taken over by a big company with need not to raise fund in the capital market.
Worasuda Yoongthong, Director of Regional and Local Consumer Health Product Protection and Promotion Division / Food and Drug Administration (FDA) noted that FDA has a new unit to offering consulting to entrepreneurs for their production process to be compliant with regulations, lessening risk and time that they need not to go back to start again.
Several products are very new and hard to be categorized, possibly leading to confused and mistaken such as microorganisms for probiotics which is hard to be categorized as food or drug.
