The MedTech scene in Singapore

Key drivers of Singapore’s MedTech industry’s growth

Existing infrastructure

Typically, the MedTech industry has high barriers of entry and longer incubation phases. In Singapore, the adoption barriers are lower as there are a lot of IT, electronics, and software companies. Mr Johnny Teo, director for healthcare and biomedical at ESG says, “These (infrastructure) provide early-stage incubation support and investments in MedTech start-ups and enables them to fast-track the development and commercialisation of technologies”.

In addition, Abel Ang, executive director and group CEO of Advanced MedTech Group noted that infrastructure in other areas such as Singapore’s “status as a global financial capital, the ease of doing business, and its growing prowess as a technology hub, especially in artificial intelligence, are big pluses”.

Public-private collaboration

According to Mr Johnny Teo, the MedTech sector in Singapore is growing because companies are getting more support from investors and the public healthcare clusters. Government funding, academic expertise, a robust start-up ecosystem, and cooperation by legacy institutions all help to drive this growth.

For instance, the Diagnostics Development Hub, formed in 2014 under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research’s (A*Star) enterprise arm, has been speeding up the commercialisation of diagnostic technologies. Major healthcare clusters have teams to accelerate clinical innovations.

In 2019, the National Research Foundation launched Singapore Health Technologies Consortium (HealthTEC) to bridge the gap between R&D and application, by connecting academics and industry partners, and provide its members with seed funding for collaboration projects.

Early-stage funding

They serve as platforms for local MedTech companies to test their products in a hospital setting, and better position the products for downstream commercialisation and adoption. In 2018, the public healthcare clusters supported more than 100 MedTech projects through clinical advisory, co-development, and test-bedding. For example, the National University Health System’s Centre for Innovation in Healthcare allows start-ups and SMEs to test their products in live ward settings before their products roll out. It also provides services such as health technology assessment, business evaluation and access to networks and capital.

Singapore is seeing more investor willingness to support early-stage start-ups in the industry, including overseas companies looking to expand to Asia. In 2018, Seeds Capital, the investment arm of ESG, co-invested more than $90 million in over 20 MedTech start-ups. In April 2019, SGInnovate named five new co-investors to focus on early-stage Deep Tech start-ups in various fields, including MedTech.

Increased scale of user-friendly solutions and standard-issue devices

“Wellness solutions are reaching scale in Singapore”, says Prof Robert Morris, Chief Technology Strategist, MOHT. This is due to the simplicity of the solutions and ease of use of standard-issue devices like smartphones and smartwatches. For instance, Fitbits count the number of steps taken. The user only needs to wear them. They can also be equipped with sensors that detect other factors, such as heart rate, or to measure the intensity of the user’s activity.

MedTech companies are increasingly leveraging standard wearable devices to provide medical information and encourage health monitoring. This is especially important where Singapore is estimated to have 900,000 elderly citizens by 2030. A simple solution is Health Beacon, a connected device for managing medication.

The device acts as a ‘smart sharps bin’ where patients who self-inject medicines can toss in instruments like hypodermic needles. The medication schedule is digitally programmed into the bin, which reminds the patient through SMS and displays a Personal Adherence Score. Health Beacon is based in Ireland but is expanding to Asia following an investment by SGInnovate in 2019.

While in the early stages, there is already an increase in the development and adoption of home-monitoring solutions. Patients can track their blood sugar, weight, and blood pressure without visiting a clinic or take a lab test. Web Biotech’s Spyder Personal is a wearable device that continuously monitors the heart’s electrical activity to detect infrequent abnormal heart rhythms. The device then sends the data to the user’s mobile phone, which can be forwarded to a medical worker.

AI-driven technology

As MedTech becomes increasingly reliant on data, AI has become crucial to the industry, according to Deloitte. In fact, global investment in healthcare AI companies amounted to almost US$1.6 billion in Q3 2019 alone.

AI can be used for descriptive and predictive analytics, chatbots for wellness coaching, and imaging analysis. Singapore-based KroniKare enables almost-instant, non-invasive assessment of chronic wounds with the use of an AI-enabled scanning device. The device’s AI system measures the wound and evaluates it against 15 years of chronic wound data. A report is then generated, which healthcare practitioners can use to help determine suitable treatments.

Again, Singapore’s existing AI expertise and infrastructure is advantageous for MedTech companies. (Read more about AI in Singapore.)

Singapore on the global deeptech radar because of COVID-19

At the time of writing, the world is still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic. Unsurprisingly, there has been an uptick in MedTech uses and Singapore is at the forefront in fighting COVID-19. We look at some examples.

Massive upscale

Local MedTech firm MiRXES, has been mass-producing diagnostic test kits, developed in just three weeks by A*Star and Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH). The kits have 100 per cent clinical sensitivity (able to detect all the positive samples tested at TTSH so far) and yields results in about 90 minutes, a gold standard among tests. The firm can produce 100,000 tests per week and is scaling up to exceed 300,000 tests a week. The tests go to more than 10 nations, and to 80 per cent of hospitals in Singapore.

Other Singapore firms have stepped up to develop various versions of test kits for COVID-19. They include Veredus Labs, Biolidics, Acumen Research Laboratories, as well as a team of researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School. Chief executive and executive director of Heritas Capital Management, which invests in DeepTech ventures, Chik Wai Chiew, said this shows that Singapore’s infrastructure was already in place to be able to scale DeepTech solutions quickly. He observed that labs had been quickly built, and the equipment to rapidly prototype, manufacture and scale solutions were already in hand. The ecosystems were also mature enough to bring together private and public sectors to collaborate to solve real-world problems.