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Media Relations Division, Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts, MITA Building, 140 Hill Street, 2nd Storey, Singapore 179369 SPEECH BY GEORGE YEO, MINISTER FOR TRADE AND INDUSTRY,
AT THE OPENING CEREMONY FOR GLAXOSMITHKLINE’S NEW
EXPANDED
FACILITY AT PIONEER SECTOR ON 23 JUN 2004 AT 11:00 AM
Your Excellency, Mr Alan Collins, British High Commissioner to Singapore; Dr David Pulman, President, Global Manufacturing and Supply, GlaxoSmithKline; I am delighted to join all of you this morning for the opening of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)’s new S$100 million expansion of its third production facility at Pioneer Sector. The relationship between GSK and Singapore goes back more than 30 years when the company invested in an antibiotics manufacturing facility at Quality Road in 1972. That was the first major pharmaceutical manufacturing investment in Singapore. In 1982, GSK built its first commercial-scale plant for Ranitidine Hydrochloride, the active ingredient for Zantac. The Chairman then, Sir Paul Girolami, made a generous contribution of S$50m towards the Glaxo Scholarship Fund which has since trained over 300 Singaporeans in engineering and other disciplines in leading universities overseas. Today, GSK is one of the largest pharmaceutical investors in Singapore with more than S$1 billion in fixed assets and 600 production staff. GSK’s early investments helped us establish Singapore’s track record in pharmaceutical manufacturing. We were then able to attract other leading pharmaceutical companies and have now become one of the top locations in the world for pharmaceutical and biotechnology manufacturing. This new expansion marks another milestone in our partnership with GSK, a partnership which is very important to Singapore. In the last three years, Singapore’s efforts in the biomedical sciences have yielded better results than what we could have reasonably expected. The industry doubled in size from the year 2000. We achieved a certain reputation in the international biomedical community for our openness to new ideas and our willingness to try new things. The Biopolis, which opened in October last year, has become the hub for biomedical research. It is home to A*STAR’s five biomedical research institutes and the R&D labs of a growing pool of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. We are gradually building up our scientific and technological capabilities in Singapore to support the rapid growth of our biomedical sciences cluster in an all rounded way. In the area of manufacturing, we have three priorities. The first is manufacturing process R&D. Towards this end, A*STAR set up the Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences (ICES) in October 2002. ICES develops new chemical processes and synthesis techniques to support chemical and pharmaceutical companies in improving their existing manufacturing capabilities. Companies in Singapore are also investing in this area. GSK, for example, recently established a new S$50 million Technology Centre with a staff strength of 50, to support process development and the introduction of new products into its Singapore operations. The EDB Biomedical Sciences Group will continue to help pharmaceutical manufacturers here expand the scope of their activities to include process R&D. Our second priority is the development of biologics manufacturing
capabilities. A*STAR’s Bioprocessing Technology Institute (BTI)
plays a key role. BTI conducts bioprocess research and provides
graduate training in areas such as expression engineering, animal
cell technology, microbial fermentation, downstream purification and
analytics. BTI started as the Bioprocessing Technology Unit in the
Chemical Engineering Department in the National University of
Singapore (NUS) back in 1990. It recently moved to its new home at
the Biopolis and has expanded its staff strength to 65 research
scientists and engineers.
In addition, many Singaporeans have been supported under EDB’s
Training in Advance Programme (TAP) for on-job-training with major
companies involved in biologics drug development and production
in various parts of the world. These and other efforts will expand our
human resource pool for the support of biologics manufacturing in
Singapore.
Our third area of priority is the establishment of pilot scale manufacturing for the development of new drug compounds. For biologics manufacturing, this capability already exists. We have a cGMP 200 litre scale mammalian cell culture facility established by BTI for the production of monoclonal antibodies and other protein therapeutics which is now operating commercially as part of A-Bio Pharma, our local biologics contract manufacturing organisation. We are planning to do the same for small-molecule, chemically-derived drugs. With its new state-of-the-art premise on Jurong Island, ICES will build small-scale kilolab facilities by next year, providing custom synthesis services to companies as well as to academic researchers. Singapore’s Biomedical Sciences cluster is likely to achieve its 2005 target annual manufacturing output of S$12 billion a full year ahead of schedule. It has become the third largest cluster in the Manufacturing sector after Electronics and Chemicals and is already a major contributor to Singapore’s economy. GSK believed in us at a time when we had reasons to doubt ourselves. I thank the leaders of GSK for your trust in Singapore all these years. We will not betray this trust. I am confident that the strategic partnership between GSK and Singapore will grow from strength to strength in the years ahead. In closing, let me congratulate the owners, management and staff of GSK on your new S$100 million expansion. It gives me great pleasure now to declare this splendid new facility officially open. Thank you.

Source: http://www.bti.a-star.edu.sg/images/pdf/media-coverage/SPEECH-YEO-230604.pdf