April 19, 2018— H.E. Dr. Suvit Maesincee, Dr. Somvong Tragoonrung, BIOTEC Executive Director and Dr. Janekrishna Kanatharana, NSTDA Executive Vice President led a group of delegation to visit the BiotechPark Berlin-Buch in Berlin. The delegates comprising representatives from Ministry of Science and Technology, NSTDA executives and researchers and representatives from major Thai corporations were met by Prof. Dr. Martin Lohse, Chair of the Board of Directors and Scientific Director of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC).
The BiotechPark Berlin-Buch is one of the largest biotech parks in Germany where companies in biotech sector, research institutes and hospital scientifically interacted and collaborated in basic and clinical research. With more than 2,900 employees working on campus and 63 companies, Berlin-Buch offers start-up ecosystem where research institutes, hospital, support organization (eg. incubators, office spaces), service provider units (legal support/ marketing) and companies are located. Different organizations focus on specific parts of the ecosystem function. Facility dedicated to clinical trial is available to entrepreneurs. Incentives eg. subsidized patent cost are available for start-ups.
Research institutes dedicated to basic research in Berlin-Buch are the MDC Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut for Molecular Pharmacology (FMP). The MDC seeks to understand the molecular mechanisms of diseases and, subsequently, develop new methods for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases. The FMP conducts basic research in Molecular Pharmacology with the aim to identify novel bioactive molecules and to characterize their interactions with their biological targets in cells or organisms.
The Thai delegations visited the Screening Unit at the Leibniz Institute for Molecular Pharmacology, led by Dr. Jens von Kries. The FMP’s Screening Unit focuses on bioprofiling of chemical compounds and systematic screening of large compound libraries or genome-wide RNAi libraries. The delegates also visited the Biobank which is a joint undertaking of the Max Delbrück Center and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin where liquid biological samples are stored.
The concept of BiotechPark Berlin-Buch could be used as a guideline for the EECi project in Thailand.