Healthcare innovation on a global scale isn’t just a pipe dream – it’s something AstraZeneca is helping to make a reality through the work of our A.Catalyst Network: an interconnected and dynamic network of more than 20 AstraZeneca health innovation hubs, made up of physical locations and virtual partnerships.
Together with our partners and diverse stakeholders from across the fields of healthcare, academia and business, we’re working to address current healthcare challenges, increase affordable and equitable access to healthcare, and scale and showcase patient-enabled innovation.
One of the more recent additions to the A.Catalyst Network, the Taiwan Hub, was officially launched in 2019, and has quickly established a presence as a leading innovator. The focus of the hub has been on building a global biomedical innovation ecosystem, connecting industries, government, academia and the medical field to create a platform where start-ups have the real possibility of ‘going from local to global’. This ecosystem enables AstraZeneca to identify promising start-ups and help to accelerate the development of their novel solutions, bringing them first and foremost to broad usage in the local ecosystem – with the ultimate vision of moving beyond the borders of where they originated.
Claudio Longo, Country President, AstraZeneca Taiwan, said: ‘Our Taiwan Hub promotes patient-centric biomedical innovation and acts as a platform for connecting stakeholders from across the healthcare space. We are committed to continue bringing promising start-ups to the international stage, promoting the Taiwan biotechnology industry and forming valuable connections in an effort to advance equitable and sustainable healthcare throughout the world.’
First steps on the journey of innovation
The story so far for the Taiwan Hub has been guided by a ‘roadmap of innovation’, beginning in earnest through AstraZeneca’s involvement in the 2019 National Biotechnology Research Park (NBRP) Biomed Startup Challenge, which saw 31 promising start-ups whittled down to eight finalists. The selected start-ups were provided with mentoring to help them develop their innovative healthcare solutions to create patient ecosystems that will improve the standard of care. This successful programme was then repeated in 2020, providing a further eight start-ups with a valuable mentoring opportunity.
During this foundation-building stage in 2019, the Taiwan Hub also established one of its key partnerships – an exciting collaboration with the Taiwanese research institute, Academia Sinica. Through this partnership, the Taiwan Hub facilitated an R&D collaboration between Academia Sinica and AstraZeneca’s Global Early CVRM team, using cryo-electron microscopy technology to identify the structure and binding partners of a guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF), a protein that is linked with injury to podocytes (specialised cells in the kidney), resulting in kidney disease. This collaboration has the potential not only to advance the standard of renal care available to patients worldwide, but to provide healthcare professionals everywhere with a greater foundational understanding of the role of the GEF protein in kidney disease.
Ben Chen, Medical Director, AstraZeneca Taiwan, said: ‘The A.Catalyst Network changes the way we develop our Therapy Area strategies, how we generate medical evidence data, and how we change the patients’ life; for example, AI technology use in research ideas, digital disease management platform for patients, innovative database investment for real-world evidence generation. We have explored new possibilities through the A.Catalyst Network.’
As we moved into 2021, the Taiwan Hub began to focus on fostering mechanisms to co-develop innovative solutions and enable resource-sharing – most significantly with the opening of the ‘Future Healthcare Lab’, co-developed with Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and AstraZeneca Taiwan, which has welcomed visits from over 170 HCPs from over 40 hospitals, to facilitate ideas sharing and potential collaboration on solution deployment. A partnership was also formalised between partners from the Taiwan Hub and our India Hub, helping to foster bilateral innovation in the two countries, and the team co-organised a milestone ‘Beyond Imagination’ webinar with five A.Catalyst Network hubs from across Asia (Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India and Singapore) to forge further connections within the region. Additionally, the Taiwan Hub brought Manifold Technology (a hub partner with a digital-device combined solution to increase COPD diagnosis in the primary care setting) to the Slush event in 2021, which showcased healthcare partnerships and innovation to a cross-sector audience from around the world.
Moving from local to global in the digital era
Building on these solid foundations, the Taiwan Hub of 2022 has entered a new phase in the era of digital transformation, one that is now focused on solution scaling and ‘going global’ – harnessing the power of the A.Catalyst Network to expand solutions beyond the local healthcare space, and into the global. The hub has identified over 10 solutions across oncology, respiratory and immunology, and cardiovascular, renal and metabolic therapy areas, including AI technologies that demonstrate the hub’s focus on going ‘beyond the pill’ in this era of digital transformation for the healthcare sector.
These solutions address a range of healthcare challenges, including increasing diagnostic rates, enhancing patient experiences and generating real-world evidence. The hub has also recently led innovative, culture-shaping virtual events to embed the focus on innovation within AstraZeneca Taiwan (including a video series welcoming leaders and employees to share their thoughts on innovation) and supported the 2022 Future Hospital Summit, organised by Taiwan Global Healthcare Association, the Swedish Trade and Invest Council and AstraZeneca Taiwan, which brought together over 70 healthcare professionals and international keynote speakers to share insights and envision how a digital hospital of the future can merge technologies and healthcare delivery into patient experiences, post-pandemic.
Looking ahead to new horizons and global possibilities
Looking to the future, the hub will continue to encourage a dual approach to innovation (‘from the top down’ as well as ‘from the bottom up’) and will focus on acting as a centre of innovation for cross-functional teams. To date, more than 30 start-ups have been mentored through the hub and over 40 healthcare organisations have now adopted solutions. Start-ups mentored by the hub are now starting to gain recognition by the wider healthcare community, with notable success stories including Aesop Technology (a winner of the 2019 NBRP Biomed Startup Challenge) winning a coveted place in the Mayo Clinic ‘Platform_Accelerate’ programme to build a new model for AI healthcare. Fuelled by successes such as these, the hub team aims to keep driving their progress by cementing strategic alliances, continuing to implement and scale-up patient solutions, and fostering healthcare clusters to accelerate patient solutions around the globe.
Jim Long, CEO, Aesop Technology, said: ‘We are pleased to work with AstraZeneca’s incredible Medical, Commercial, and Innovation teams, with their diversity of thought allowing us to explore unmet needs in digital health. Furthermore, AstraZeneca’s teams are well-connected with hospitals and have guided us with further business engagement.'
With so much already achieved in just three years – and plans in place to create further opportunities for innovation with a global reach – the future looks exciting for our Taiwan Hub and the A.Catalyst Network. But innovation doesn’t happen in isolation; if you share our ambition to shape the future of healthcare and improve patient experiences and outcomes, we want to hear from you. Whether you’re a start-up, academic organisation or large company, apply to become our next partner on our A.Catalyst Network Portal.