The tour aimed to provide the BMS students with a more profound idea of what are the many professional areas and career opportunities Biopolis has to offer. The tour group was led by our SAS academic staff Ms Magdeleine Lew, who is also currently advisor to the RP Chinese Orchestra (RPCO).

Conceived as the cornerstone of a much broader vision to build up the biomedical sciences industry in Singapore, the Biopolis is a purpose-build biomedical research hub where researchers from the public and private sectors are co-located. A guided tour and presentation of 3 of the 5 major research institutes at Biopolis was conducted by A*Star representatives. The 3 institutes that were visited during this tour were the Bioprocess Technology Institute (BTI), the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) and the Bioinformatics Institute (BII).

The tour started with a briefing by a research scientist at the BTI explaining her research on Animal Cell Culture, where she is currently working with a range of industrially important host cells directed at designing media and feeding strategies to achieve high cell density & quality cultures. To further extend the achieved improvements, her team is exploring environmental and chemical strategies to prevent apoptosis in bioreactor cultures. Guided by insights from genomic analysis of fed-batch processes, they have also identified several molecular chaperones as potential cell engineering targets for enhancement of recombinant protein production in cultures with extended viability. The briefing ended with a spontaneous question & answer session, followed by a both informative and interesting video show.

Antibody therapy and genetic vaccines are poised to become the next wave of biotherapeutics. It was a rare eye-opener for 2nd year BMS students Ms Kalianda Poovama and Ms Michelle Tan to get to see a scaled up bioprocess reactor purifying proteins and DNA plasmids devoid of RNA, protein and genomic DNA, which is important for therapeutic applications.

Plasmids are small, independently replicating, pieces of extrachromosomal cytoplasmic DNA that can be transferred from one organism to another. Work is in progress to dissect the metabolic pathway of plasmid bearing bacteria which have slower growth rates with the aim of engineering them to achieve high cell densities. And by using microarray and real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR), teams at BTI are investigating the roles of genes involved in precursor synthesis, energetic requirements and plasmid folding which may impact on cellular metabolism.

Concurrently to the upstream work, BTI is developing expertise for the removal and analysis of impurities from plasmid DNA. Sequentially, plasmid DNA of up to 94% purity had been attained using membrane ion exchanger. Studies are ongoing to determine the capacity of methods compared to conventional ion exchangers.

Our next stop was at BII where it is envisioned to be among the premier Bioinformatics centers in the world. We were first briefed by one of the BII expert where she shared with us the institute’s fostering and providence of an environment for conducting leading-edge informatics research, development and high quality multi-disciplinary training to generate knowledge from large volumes of diverse datasets from Biology and Chemistry.

The Bioinformatics Institute will be working at the intersection of biology, chemistry and other scientific disciplines in the quest for transforming data to knowledge that has an impact in accelerating information driven biology and medicine.

One of the most significant openings of new frontiers by the BII is the development of the Biomedical Imaging and Visualization toolkit released in November 2002. This toolkit will provide a set of reusable libraries, to reduce development work for researchers and students. Here, 2nd Year BMS student Mr Chiam Daming listened attentively to the innovations in Biomedical Imaging.

Besides developing the Biomedical Imaging and Visualization toolkit, BII is also conducting extensive Biomedical Imaging research on Computer-Assisted Intervention, developing Human Body Models, constructing Medical Devices, as well as Neuroimaging.

Following our visit was to some of the most technologically advanced laboratories at BII such as the Super-Computer Laboratory. It was one of the few stops where students get to experience some of the most sophisticated super-computer in the world. The lab comprises of a humongous server capable of hosting a series of computer network, processing high speed rendering and generation of complicated graphical statistics, providing high speed front line technical expertise and tight network security linking all five major research institutes.

Our final stop brought us to the GIS where all of us were honoured to be briefed by Dr Lin Chin-Yo, who is a current research associate in the Genome Institute of Singapore, an expertise in the area of microarray. Dr Lin explained to us the production, use and analysis of DNA microarrays. His laboratory dealt with providing human mouse and CHO microarray chips and data analysis for gene profiling studies.

Dr Lin elaborated that a major part of their work in proteomics is in the use of quantitative analysis of protein expression by combining two-dimensional gel electrophoresis followed by high resolution image analysis and the use of stable isotopes introduced metabolically into the cellular protein during culture so that information about the cellular processes essential to our understanding of cells growing in bioreactors can be revealed.

The Biopolis tour was indeed a fruitful and satisfying experience exposing RP’s BMS students to the diversified areas for those keen in pursuing their career in Biopolis in future. Biomedical Science student Darius Joel Seow, who hopes to pursue his Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine & Surgery (BVMS) at The Royal Veterinary College, University of London, said enthusiastically, “The tour provided me with fabulous information on the various career options that will aid me in choosing my field of specialization carefully for a fulfilling & enriching career.”

Contributed by Darius Seow, 2nd Year SAS Student