At a workshop held by the HCM City Medical College on December 21, Dr Nguyen Duc Thai, chief scientist at the Saigon Hi-tech Park’s Biotech Division, said Vietnam has achieved the critical mass required for international quality, multi-disciplinary bio-technology research and development.

It should expand the use of bio-technologies from other countries to improve its pharmaceutical industry, he said.

Vietnam has many facilities like the Hanoi Institute of Bio-technologies, the Vietnam Gene Therapy Centre at Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi, and the Institute of Vaccine in Nha Trang to enable this.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said there were many bio-technologies for improving health care in developing countries like Vietnam.

They include technologies for recombinant vaccine development for infectious diseases and sequence pathogen genomes to improve vaccine and drug development.

Phan Kim Ngoc of the Natural Science College’s Stem Cell Research and Application Laboratory said the drug industry remains underdeveloped.

“Vietnam does not make raw materials for most drugs and so 90 percent is imported,” he said.

Besides, imports also accounted for more than 60 percent of the drugs sold in the country market, he said.

Technology and human resources were also lacking, preventing the pharmaceutical industry from accessing modern technologies or growing large, he said.

Vietnam should focus on bio-pharmaceuticals which are being developed in many countries, he said.

Bio-pharmaceuticals that have been developed in recent times included interferon, proteins that enable communication between cells to trigger the immune system, interleukin, which regulated the immune system, and others.

Ngoc said the government planned to earmark US$1.5 billion for the development of the pharmaceutical industry in the next 10 years and has begun to attach importance to biotechnology.

VNS