The Dean of the School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, Michael Lu, revealed in an exclusive interview with media that Berkeley is joining forces with Stanford University and Taiwan's IBMI to plan the first "International Biotechnology and Healthcare Investment Conference" to be held in Taiwan as early as March next year, attracting international biotechnology investors from Asia and other venture capital funds to Taiwan to look for partners, hoping to build Taiwan into a biomedical hub for the Asia-Pacific.

Lu recently came to Taiwan to organise the said conference. He added that the world's largest and renowned biotech conference, the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, is held in San Francisco in January every year, and attracts thousands of thousands of potential start-ups and international investors from around the world. He was inspired to help organise a similar healthcare investment conference in Taiwan as a paradigm for Asia.

Lu said he hopes to help Taiwan create a platform for medical and biotechnology co-operation, focusing on international links in manufacturing, investment and research and development, and matchmaking to facilitate signing co-ops. In the future, this will not only bring Taiwan's best biomedical innovations into the world, but also bring the world's best biomedical innovation resources into Taiwan.

The National Development Council and UC Berkeley's joint programme has since 2021 selected 12 biomedical startups to the United States for training. It is worth mentioning that Michael Lu immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was five years old. In 2019, he became the dean of the School of Public Health and called on the NDC to put forward the idea of leveraging the resources of the School of Public Health to help Taiwan's outstanding biotechnology innovation teams to succeed and accelerate their connection to the U.S. market.

According to Lu's observation, Taiwan has the world's best healthcare system, a strong technological background, well-qualified human resources, and the world's best manufacturing capabilities. However, there are three things that need to be strengthened in biotech startups: First, new start-ups need to have technology first, and they should look for problems in technology rather than finding technology to solve problems. Second, some of the startups come from academia and lack long-term business strategies. Third, Taiwan's industry scale is not too large to meet the demand of Silicon Valley. How to show communication skills in presentation meetings, to tell stories for products, to convince industry leaders and investors to agree and invest, and to win their trust, still needs to be strengthened.

"Taiwan's strongest advantage is in manufacturing, especially in contracted manufacturing," Lu said. "The CDMO that is being developed to manufacture pharmaceuticals and medical devices is worth developing." In addition, Taiwan's manufacturing capacity is very strong and can produce large quantities of generic drugs and antibody drugs. If Taiwan's biomedical industry can be developed as TSMC has achieved now, the industry will stay ahead amongst competitors.

Taiwan's ICT sector is very strong and can be integrated with the biomedical field. Lu suggested that the government should provide support with policies, as well as increase the investment of subsidies in the biomedical industry. On the other hand, it is very difficult to train data for the use of medical AI. In the United States, data is collected from hospital to hospital, while in Taiwan, healthcare has a large amount of data, which is complete, but not easy to use due to privacy issues, and if it can be solved, there will be a great opportunity for the development of public health.