TCELS Joined Hands with the Medical Sciences Department
By Newswit
06 February 2012
TCELS joined hands with the Medical Sciences Department, the Ramathibodi Hospital and Japan’s RIKEN Genomic Sciences Centre to host a regional conference on Pharmacogenomics, with an aim to establish an international network of genomic services.
Siam City/ Science and Technology Minister Plodprasop Suraswadi presided at the opening ceremony of the 1st Meeting South East Asian Pharmacogenomics Research Network organized by the four agencies, including Thailand Center of Excellence for Life Sciences (TCELS) under the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Medical Sciences Department under the Ministry of Public Health, Ramathibodi Hospital under Mahidol University and RIKEN Genomic Sciences Centre in Japan. Participants included the Science Ministry executives and leading pharmacogenomics researchers from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia as well as Thailand.
Mr. Plodprasop said pharmacogenomics is a genomic-age technology which is now gaining worldwide attention as it studies about each individual’s genetic response to drugs. The meeting to establish the South East Asian regional network on Pharmacogenomics is a good start for leading pharmacogenomic researchers from many countries to share their experiences and listen to the research progress of others. Besides, it also leads to an international networking of pharmacogenomics services.
TCELS director Suriyan Phanpeng said his agency has been cooperating with Ramathibodi Hospital’s Faculty of Medicine since 2005 to carry out the pharmacogenomics project which offers a great benefit to the country. The study involves an individual’s genetic response to drugs which consequently helps to improve their quality of life, as well as to save the national budget.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Wasan Chantratit, head of the Virology Division and Pharmacogenomics Laboratory under the Parasitology Department, Faculty of Medicine said previous genomic researches were limited only to developed countries as the cost of researches is very much expensive. In 2011, an individual genetic decoding cost as much as 500,000 baht. Therefore, most of the existing genomic datas came from people in developed countries, which cannot represent the entire Asian population. The study of genomic levels found that the genomic data of American people, European, African, China, Japan and Korea populations are different from that of the Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand.
Dr. Wasan said currently the cost of human genome decoding is significantly decreasing to only $1,000 or about 30,000 baht per case and continues to go down. This increases the developing countries’ potential for conducting their own researches on genome. Besides, the biodiversities in human population, animals, plants and microorganisms are also the advantages for genomic researches. For instance, the ASEAN network of pharmacogenomics have biodiversity patterns that are close to each other, thus will drive the development of diagnostic methods and interpretation of pharmacogenomics results which involved 560 million people among the ASEAN populations, instead of using non-regional data which may result in an incorrect interpretation due to the genomic differences.