“Because of that one project, others looked at Singapore and said, ‘Hey, it has more than technical synthesis capability, they also have biologics right now,’” says Chu, who notes that the city-state has attracted (US) $1.5 billion of biologics manufacturing investment to date. Many of the companies in Bio*One’s portfolio today have operations in Singapore. It has a significant investment in South San Francisco-based Fluidigm, which makes integrated fluidic chips designed to analyze DNA and tissues for drugs, sorting out the vast data that used to take a room full of machines and robots to process. “We figured out how to take all these huge, highly automated machines and miniaturize all the fluidic elements and put them onto high-density chips,” says CEO Gajus Worthington.

The executive says Singapore emerged as an ideal spot for its operations because of its semiconductor acumen, expertise in materials science, and its growing work in biochemistry and life sciences, all at the industrial level. Singapore was affordable, had the skills, provided IP safeguards, and offered not only funding but set-up help. “That saved us months and months.”

Another Bio*One portfolio company, S*Bio, was Singapore’s first biotech company to undertake a Phase I clinical trial—with an anticancer compound called SB939, and a histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor targeting solid tumors and hematological cancers. With deep exposure in big pharma and biopharma, scientists in the city-state “made it possible to do a discovery program in less than 12 months, which is very unusual,” says Jan-Anders Karlsson, S*Bio’s CEO. S*Bio also cut the time it took to prepare the new compound for trials to only nine months, Karlsson adds.

Bio*One-backed Merlion Pharma focuses on antibiotics and has taken two compounds into clinical trials in the last 12 months, according to COO Chris Molloy. He describes the company’s finafloxacin compound, now completing Phase I trials, as “a highly potent eradicator” of Helicobacter pylori (H.pylori), a bacterium present in the stomach lining in half of the human population. A factor in gastric ulceration, H. pylori is also the only bacterium designated as a class I carcinogen by the World Health Organization. “Finafloxacin is specifically activated under acidic conditions,” Molloy says, adding that most marketed antibiotics become less active under acid conditions—just when infection usually occurs. “We are seeing up to a thousand-fold difference in activity between our compound in acid conditions and the marketed gold standard.”

There is no question that Singapore has captured the world’s attention with its commitment to biomedical research, and that it has become a magnet for international talent. Karlsson says half of S*Bio’s scientists are Singaporeans, and the rest foreigners who were either recruited in Singapore or came from abroad. “It’s a lot easier to get people to move here than it is to get someone to move to Germany,” he says. “For one thing, it’s English and cosmopolitan—people know they will be understood.” Whether those scientists will stay, and whether they can succeed in creating a world-class center, is what remains to be seen.