The Ministry of Economic Affairs took the initiative to explore the investment opportunity among the corporations, understand their corporate investment plans and issues, as well as implement and support their own corporate interests. On July 25, led by the Minister of Economic Affairs, Dr. Li Shi-Guang, Director General of Industrial Development Bureau, Dr. Wu Ming-Ji, and their associates visited the Microbio Group. The Microbio Group was led by the founder, Mr. William Lu and his senior executives from the 8 subsidiary companies, including Microbio, Oneness Biotech, CHO Pharma, SiNew Pharma, 3D Pharma, Fountain Biopharma, Synovel Sciences, and Diamond Biofund. The agenda included company visits, meetings, as well as visiting the laboratories.
The Microbio Group adopted a diversified business model. This includes Oneness Biotech specializes in developing new botanical drugs and healthcare products; Fountain Biopharma owns the largest humanized antibody library; CHO Pharma which has the world-leading technique in saccharide chemistry as the new drug target and synthesis technology; Diamond Biofund which is a mutual fund led by large Taiwanese enterprises for biotech investment, etc. These companies are progressively demonstrating some significant results on different biotech platform.
The biotech industry has been considered as one of Taiwan’s top five innovative industries. The objective is to base on R&D and innovation as the main driving power to become the Asia Pacific’s biotech and pharmaceutical development center. This further demonstrates government’s determination in continuing to promote biotech industry. At the meantime, the government also supports and helps the companies to conduct independent R&D, encourages prospective and innovative technological development, such that our biotech industry will gradually become outstanding and prominent worldwide as well as become more attractive for investment from both local and international companies.
During the meeting, Mr. Lu (the founder of Microbio Group) made some suggestions such as deregulating company acquisition, accelerating the expansion of biotech market capital so that we can support the companies that require it, developing cross-Strait new drug recognition system, as well as organizing the Taiwan New Drug Licensing Forum, etc. Mr. Lu also hopes the government will listen to the voice from the biotech industry, promote the biotech development, as well as accelerating the activities in the biotech industry.