By Beatriz Marie D. Cruz, journalist
TAIPEI – Asia Pathogenomics, Co. Ltd. (APG), founded in Taiwan, plans to expand its metagenomic sequencing diagnostics to Southeast Asian countries by 2026 to help achieve more accuracy in detecting infectious diseases, its chief executive said on Thursday. responsible.
APG President Roger Liu said the company is looking to expand the use of “next-generation sequencing technology” in hospitals in the region, adding the Philippines, to help medical professionals faster clinical treatments for infectious diseases.
“The technology for traditional detection in hospitals are based on hypothesis,” Mr. Liu told BusinessWorld on the sidelines of the Healthcare+ Expo in Taipei City, Taiwan. “[In] next-generation sequencing tech-nology, we detect unknown pathogens without hypothesis. We can sequence all the pathogens in one shot.”
Current pathogen detection strategies rely primarily on culture, which accounts for about 30% of the detection rate, resulting in clinical misreporting, according to the Healthcare Expo website.
Spencer Hwang, APG’s associate director of marketing, said the company will expand its collaborations with medical centers in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines.
“We know for sure that right now, Southeast Asia is currently a new emerging market,” Mr. Hwang told BusinessWorld. “It’s a good chance for us [to expand] like maybe in the next five years.”
“We named ourselves as Asia Pathogenomics [because] we want to cover much [of] Asia,” he added.
Liu cited Taiwan’s government’s new southward policy, introduced by Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, which aimed to expand the country’s presence in the Indo-Pacific region by leveraging its cultural, educational, agricultural, technological and economic assets. .
He said 10 Taiwanese medical centers are expected to join hospitals in seven Southeast Asian countries to introduce their next-generation sequencing technology.
Mr. Hwang added that APG is focusing on fully integrating the technology in Taiwanese hospitals before it expands to other Asian countries.
According to Dr. Liu, using the classic generation of pathogen detection can lead to a maximum of 20 deaths.
“[Traditional tests] have to ‘guess’ what pathogen it is,” he said. “But through next-generation sequencing technology, we can find viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites all at once. “
Although the first papers on next-generation sequencing technology emerged a decade ago, its use was limited due to high costs, Mr. Liu said.
In recent years, however, generation has become more affordable and pathogens are more detectable, he said.
“Lately there are more than 30,000 pathogens that the database [can locate], so it is less difficult to use. . . But classical controls can detect less than 10 pathogens at a time, so it is difficult to locate which pathogen [is the source of an infectious disease. ] »
Since 2019, there have been 772. 17 million confirmed cases of coronavirus (COVID-19), a known infectious disease, worldwide, in 6. 98 million deaths and a three-year pandemic.
The Philippines alone had 4.12 million confirmed COVID cases, causing 66,746 deaths.