Singapore’s Unique Approach to Fostering and Backing Healthcare Innovation | LSI Asia '25

Irene Cheong  0:05  
So good morning. Everybody sounds like it was a wonderful evening last night, and some of our friends may still be waking up to the morning. So thank you so much for being part of our panel this morning. I'm so excited to be here and sharing some insights and conversation with my panelists, maybe just a quick show of hands. I can see you guys are looking this way. How many people are not from Singapore? Very good. So thank you for coming to this panel. We always love an opportunity to share about the things that are happening in Singapore with the context of Singapore to the rest of Asia Pacific and to the rest of the world. So what we'll do for the next 30 minutes is just share our perspectives from Singapore, the little red dot, what we're doing in net tech, and hopefully we will be able to share conversations that a little bit off the beaten track, stuff that you won't hear officially from the government, although we are from the government, and then later on, we'll be outside as the panel. If you have any more questions you want to come talk to us, happy to take some of these conversations outside. So first of all, round of introductions, maybe I'll start from the end of my panel. Just a quick introduction. Who you are, what you do in Singapore, and your contact for Medtech for Singapore. Go ahead.

Anselm Tan  1:20  
Thank you. Irene. My name is Anselm. I'm at ClavystBio. Clevis bio is a firm dedicated to venture building and investing in life sciences. We invest across C and Series A, B, C onwards, but we also build and launch companies in Singapore and globally. At clevis bio, we invest across therapeutics, Medtech and digital health. I lead the med tech and digital parts of

Irene Cheong  1:47  
the business. Thank you so much. Anselm, Danny, Hi. Good

Danny Belkin  1:50  
morning, everyone. I'm Danny Belkin. I head the SingHealth technology incubator, basically the startup creation engine for SingHealth, being the largest public health care group in the country.

Irene Cheong  2:02  
Hi, Joseph. 

Joseph Mocanu  2:03  
Hi. I'm Joseph mccanu, co founder and Managing Partner of verge Health Tech fund. We're Singapore based, but we invest globally and very early in impactful healthcare technology companies that can potentially move the needle for millions of people around the world. Thank you, 

Irene Cheong  2:18  
Jui.

Jui Lim  2:20  
Morning, everyone. My name is Jui. I'm the CEO of SG innovate. Sgnovate is a government backed fund. We operate at the earliest stages of the food chain. So we're dedicated early stage deep tech investors. We're not wedded to any space, and we invest in the broader sense of the word deploying capital, people and networks.

Irene Cheong  2:44  
Thanks, Dre so I am the moderator. My name is Irene Cheong. Very happy to have all of you as part of the session. I represent the agency for science, technology and research in Singapore. You learn nothing is our love for acronyms. My acronym is a star. So I represent an organization of 6000 people, 4500 scientists. We're part of the ministry, Ministry of Trade and Industry, interestingly, and so our main motivation in life is to interact with industry to create solutions that can benefit Singapore's economy. So my role has been in the Singapore government for a long time. Now. I've seen how Singapore has evolved over time. So it's a very interesting panel today because we have representation from across the ecosystem from Medtech, and we've specially assembled this panel so that you can get a glimpse of all how all the different cogs work together within the Medtech ecosystem for Singapore. So I wanted to also share very quickly that in Singapore, we may be very small, but perhaps our size is also our advantage. We're extremely well coordinated. The lovely thing is that we all know each other. We're literally 1015, minutes a drive from each other. And then hopefully, through this session, you'll hear a little bit more about what makes Medtech tick in Singapore for the world, from the different perspectives, from a healthcare system, from a VC, from a venture builder, and then for myself, because I represent the scientists at the very beginning of ideation into what could be a startup company or a product or a solution that a larger company can take up. So maybe I'll start with a question to the panelists from their perspectives on Singapore, and I'll start from this side, because dway has also been involved with the Singapore ecosystem for a long time. So dway, what do you think Singapore's approach to health care, med tech has been different? And what do you think do we what do we really have to offer to the world that is unique if they were to place themselves in Singapore?

Jui Lim  4:38  
Well, I think one of the benefits that we've enjoyed has been the fact that we're late comers. So we've had the opportunity to look at, you know, some of the best things that are happening elsewhere in the world, and we've tried to piece together something that we think, we hope, works. I. Think the substrate, the foundation, is a very, very strong one. I mean, I think if you look at our doctors today, for the majority of our doctors, they train locally, and then for their first degree, their basic medical degree, and almost all of them are then sent outside to the rest of the world, especially if you're specialists, again, to learn best practice. So they're incredibly well trained. And I think that's the most important substrate. I mean, that's the foundation of everything, yeah, beyond that, of course, you know, to varying degrees of success, the commercialization of that native capability, I think, has been decent. I wouldn't say it's been great, and we continue to try very hard to, you know, get, get a return out of our research investment. But I think fundamentally, the most important thing is the strength of our medical system.

Irene Cheong  6:07  
Yeah. And then there's a lovely segue, maybe I can bring that to Danny to talk about our health care system. So Singapore is very privileged. We have a very good public sector health care system. 80% of our patients are taken care of by the public health care system, which is quite distinct from other economies and other jurisdictions. And then Danny represents the innovation side of the house. He's been deeply involved with spitting out companies, enabling product formation out of SingHealth, which is our largest healthcare cluster. So over to you, Danny. From that perspective, what do you think we've been doing differently that can really bring something different to the

Danny Belkin  6:39  
world? Thanks. Irene, I think I absolutely thank you also, jury for making that point. I think Singapore definitely benefits from having absolutely top class, internationally renowned KOLs in multiple fields, and that is the bedrock of what we do. Beyond that, a couple of additional advantages. First of all, Singapore is a multi ethnic population, and this really draws a lot of companies to come here and do research, applied research and research, translational research into different disease types that in a very high quality control area, you can Tap and test and deploy technologies that address multiple ethnicities, Chinese, Indian, Malays, etc, and that's a major draw. And the second aspect is the high quality of support that we're really very actively trying to put in at the hospital level to support working with industry, working with startups, multinationals, and developing technologies internally that has been lacking, relatively speaking, at the hospitals historically, but is really coming up in leaps and bounds over the past few years, and is a great engine that has shown substantial success in recent years.

Irene Cheong  7:59  
Yeah, Danny, you just launched a very interesting incubator. You've done incubation for a while now within SingHealth, but there's this new entity called scout. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Danny Belkin  8:10  
Thanks. So scout is a startup creation engine. We basically take technology projects from throughout the SingHealth cluster, being the largest public health care entity in Singapore, no matter which technology type, no matter which clinical domain, and we will seek to support very intensively with regards to funding, bringing in investors, entrepreneurs, mentors, vendors, consultants, etc, really do everything that we can to take out any obstacles that researchers and clinicians will face on the way of technology development, and really try to de risk these technologies as far as possible before we bring them in front of investors, basically seeking to optimize the yield of companies that emerge from a healthcare cluster at Sing health, yeah, so

Irene Cheong  9:01  
that's a very exciting new initiative from SingHealth. It's born out of SingHealth own programs, but you'll see in Singapore that the government is very proactive. Dra also has a fair number of these programs that support young innovators as well as young companies to scale. And we'll talk about scaling from Singapore into the world a bit later on. So if you're interested to find out more about some of these programs that we have in Singapore. We have a booth outside that is helmed by our EDB ESG, at a star friends. So if you can go have a chat with them, we can share more about our programs. So Joy talked about the quality of our clinicians, and I fully agree in terms of world leading KOLs and diseases were absolutely there. But I actually think that one of the reasons why Medtech makes a lot of sense for Singapore is our engineering base. And if you look at the history of Singapore's economy, there's a lot of manufacturing that's about engineering, and we are powerhouses when it comes to designing and making engineering parts as well as devices for the world from Singapore and. Gonna look at Ansem now, because he came from the Philip side of the house, and now he's an investor with clavis. Do you want to speak a little bit about your perspective on what makes Singapore unique from a Medtech perspective?

Anselm Tan  10:11  
Thank you. Singapore is a small country, and I think that could be used an advantage. Unity is a strength. What Singapore can do, and has been doing, is kind of like a whole of systems approach in addressing innovation and unmet needs. The different parts of the ecosystem that you can see here includes government agencies as launch pads, but also as venture partners. We have the ecosystem substrates which we mentioned, the clinicians innovating strongly with the hospital. First approach centered around the patient care, but also progressive policies which allows innovators, entrepreneurs to test new models with the significant push towards areas like preventive care community, community based care and reimbursement models.

Irene Cheong  11:08  
Yeah, thanks for raising that about preventive care. So in Singapore, we have no natural resources. Our only natural resource are our people. So I think my joke is, if the government could let us live forever and pay taxes forever, they would, but that's a joke. I think at the end of the day, what we want to make sure is that we're enabling every person to fulfill their full potential. And so one of the big trends that we're seeing is around successful longevity, right? It's not about aging anymore, but how do I increase the health span of every individual in Singapore? And this is something that we want to do in Singapore more successfully, and because of our size, I think we have a opportunity to roll this out at a population level. And you know, so an eye, we're working together a little bit now, and we just signed an MOU that combines all the engines of productization and commercialization from a star with the venture creation capabilities at at clavis. So I think this whole thing around venture building and enabling ideas to become companies is something that we are really promoting and supporting out of Singapore. So talking about creating new ventures, Joseph, you've been involved with Angel investing into you've got your own fund now. Do you want to share a little bit about your journey from that point of creating companies of the angel into what you're doing now, and some trends that you're seeing, not just in Singapore, but globally, for the Medtech space.

Joseph Mocanu  12:31  
Cheryl Owen said, in order, so it's interesting, when I got into angel investing, it was really kind of accidentally stumbling or rediscovering it. I was working as a management consultant at the time, and my clients, which were global pharmaceutical and biotech companies, were looking for local partners to assist with some of the non pharmaceutical aspects of the business, around market access, market entry, looking at business intelligence, and they're looking for finance, education, delivery and technology partners in the region, and they couldn't really find any partners, aside from banks or insurance companies on the financing side. So we met all interest startups that were just way too subscale for these large multinational companies to work with, because they want to just have one partner for the region. They don't want to work with different partners in every different Southeast Asian country. So I met these entrepreneurs. They were doing really good work. I thought I understood the technology, thought I understood the market, and I figured if I gave them some money and they'd lose it, I'd just make more money two weeks later, because that's how paychecks work. It's kind of fun. And then, you know, after investing in quite a few companies and actually being the first investor in two companies, realized that I like that more than writing PowerPoint slides that nobody reads as a management consultant, and I found that the level of impact was disproportionate, or rather inversely correlated, with how much the client paid for them. So we had a $1 million project that basically nobody read, and it was shelved, and then we had a $50,000 project that touched 400,000 lives. So, you know, it showed that a little bit of money can go a long way. And so with the angel investing, that also showed that a little money can go a long way, which led me to start verg Seven years ago. And now we've invested in 30 companies across all six inhabited continents on earth, one of, one of, I guess, some of the trends. I guess, where should I begin with the trends? I mean, everyone knows it's winter, and it's been winter for the past few years. And I think the question is, how do you navigate through that winter? I think that people have had to get really creative with finding sources of funding, non dilutive sources of funding, strategic partnerships, advanced revenue structures, milestones, all those things have taken the place of traditional venture capital. And even within the pure equity players, it has been more of the family offices and high net worth individuals that have taken the place of funds that have all but disappeared. And I think part of unfortunately, the. Lack of liquidity, the lack of successful exits, and a lack of those kind of multiples that venture needs, has driven this rather dry spell in funding, which probably, you know, requires a little bit of reflection from both the start of and the actual VC side to see, you know, are we doing the right thing and having the right strategy? Is this model sustainable? I can go on, but I'll pause. Yeah,

Irene Cheong  15:23  
thanks for that. So talking about being creative, one of the things that we like to do in Singapore is support young companies. And I think amongst the various agencies that we have in Singapore, there are forms of non dilutive funding. But importantly, we find that it's not just about the money, but it's also about the expertise. And so one of the things that we've put together at a star is this group called Medtech catapult, because we realized that a lot of innovators get to a point where they have these prototypes, and then they kind of hit the wall, because they didn't think about the build of material. They didn't think about what was the regulatory requirements for the things that they need to take care of in their design. And so we put in place these, what we call national platforms to work with these young innovators. And they don't have to be from Singapore. They came from anywhere in the world to come and say, why don't you come to Singapore? Let us put these expert engineers in your midst to work with you on your products. And this is something we found to be very helpful for these young innovators and companies and the different forms of these creative, non dilutive help that is also together with funding that's available in Singapore. So if you're a young company, a young innovator, looking for that next thing you want to create that is going to touch many lives and solve many health care problems, you might want to do it from Singapore, and maybe I'll open that conversation to Anson, because these are the two VCs plus DRA but he's government on the panel to share a little bit of what your your thinking is on the funding situation that we have for Medtech. But also, what are the new trends you're anticipating in Medtech?

Anselm Tan  16:59  
The funding situation in Medtech is very tough, and we think that it might get tougher. It's been a while, but I think it's also a function of the way capital has been deployed used, and we draw a lot of lessons from the past where, you know Medtech, but also generally capital and liquidity availability was at the higher the peaks. I think we got to unlearn some of the ways which we used to deploy capital into finding ways to make capital more efficient. Joseph has mentioned some of these to partnerships, to non dialectic funding and collaborations. But having said that metric is also a very broad category. You could break down that into devices, software, diagnostics and so on. And if you go down to the sub segments, you see that the trends have played out pretty differently. Diagnostics have been in a multi year decline. I think it still is a challenging segments, but there have been promising domains within that incident disease domains like neuro degenerative diseases and so on. Net Tech has kind of rebounded a bit, if you look at the public markets globally in 2024 from a very dry and tough 2023 I think investors, governments and private select, growing his lessons to deploy capital more sharply and and the promising trends would have to be a clear pathway, not just to profitability, but to impacting patient outcomes.

Irene Cheong  19:00  
Thanks for that. So you know, Joy has been a very successful investor. He's run med tech companies before. So very curious, from his point of view, being a clinician himself, what are some of these new trends that you're seeing in Medtech that you think could be really successful coming out of Singapore?

Jui Lim  19:17  
Well, before I answer that question, I just want to follow on from what please do you know, I think it's in a bit of a funk right now. I think to the extent that med tech includes digital health, probably you've seen the most activity on the digital health side, to the point where, you know, really, if you're the buyer, you're almost paralyzed, right? So it's kind of hit its own internal contradictions. I think the medical device side probably is suffering from a lack of positive news, such as we've seen in the drug space, whether it's sglt One and Two inhibitors, GLP one agonist. New drugs for neuro degenerative disease, cancer, ADCs, car T cells. So I think that's, you know, it's all contributing on top of the whole, you know, sort of malaise. Yeah. I think going forward, I think, you know, digital on itself. My feeling is it's probably hit a wall, I think. But I think the convergence between software and hardware, I think there's still a lot of things to be done in that space. I think customization, you know, you know, it still doesn't make sense that stents are sized in discrete numbers. I mean, when we know blood vessels taper over, you know, you know, as you as you go from to the periphery, I think that's probably an area that's worth looking at. I think new materials are important, yep. So

Irene Cheong  21:01  
you know, to Anselm's point about med tech, and med tech is so broad. So in Singapore, we love categorizations and little groupings that help us frame where we sit. So in our heads, med tech would be medical devices, digital health. Interestingly, we would include life science instruments, and then also diagnostics. And all of them are actually really, really discreet. So part of the challenge we have as a Singapore ecosystem is for each of these, how do we choose to support them? So maybe as a roundup, we have another five, six minutes left. I'll just like to ask the panel that this closing question about if you could wave a magic wand and change something about, you know, in your specific space, that would really change and catapult and accelerate the growth of Medtech for the world or out of Singapore. What would that magic wand do if you could? And now I'll leave it to whoever wants to take up first.

Joseph Mocanu  22:02  
Yeah, can I have a couple?

Irene Cheong  22:04  
Yeah, please wave your magic wand away. 

Joseph Mocanu  22:06  
So, so one, one magic wand would be harmonization of all medical regulatory regimes across planet Earth, because that is one really big barrier where you want basically slightly different information in completely different formats with completely different timelines, and you can't do them in parallel. So that's one huge barrier. It's very expensive to do this. I think the second thing would be, there needs to be some sort of market mechanism, or some sort of solution for widgets, as opposed to companies, because there's a lot of companies that are really widgets, and it would be nice if there's a mechanism, like maybe a mini private equity, or some sort of, you know, I don't know, like flagship type of model, but for these, like little micro surgical products that have very limited, but very important applications, but don't deserve to have a whole company formed around them. And I see so so many of these, because unfortunately, when you're going to VC route, you need a 10 to 20x and it's risk adjusted, and there's very few of those cases in med device, especially after the first or two the second round of funding. So a magic wand to radically simplify the route to market and product development of these kind of more single, single serving type of solutions.

Irene Cheong  23:22  
Thank you. I would, I think, you know, one of the things that public agencies can can help with is almost be like a receiving end to many of these things that are coming out of the public sector, and then we enable them to then flow into receptacles, you know, be it existing companies or group them together to form startups. So one thing we have done out of Singapore government, again, is another national platform called the diagnostics development hub, because we observed that really clever clinicians make very good observations about biomarkers. But then there are these things that nobody can do anything with. So through this 80 person organization, we actually make them into kits or LDTs that can be deployed within the hospital. So I think if you are, again, an innovator, and you have a little widget that you want to take forward, but don't have the mechanism to take it to the marketplace, maybe the Singapore groups can support you. Anybody else wants to wave their magic wand make a prediction about what could make a huge difference to med tech

Danny Belkin  24:17  
movement, I think from at least from our perspective here on the ground and hopefully share this we've there's been tremendous investment over the past 20 years, and admittedly, the ecosystem is relatively young. In our biomedical ecosystem, what we haven't seen so far is really a massive story of success that everybody can then anchor on, and that will sort of explode things hopefully tied to this, I'd say, together with the growth, growth of the ecosystem is a movement for more comfort with risk. This is something that Singapore still has to develop on, but we are aware, and we are working on this constantly.

Irene Cheong  24:57  
Yeah, I think to your point about success, you know. Nothing motivates people more than seeing somebody else succeed. And you go, I can be that too. So on that note, of success, one of our a star spin outs, mirax's, which is a diagnostic company 10 years in the making, went IPO on the Hong Kong stock exchange as a as a unicorn. So we're extremely proud of the team. It took 10 years of hard, sheer hard work to get them there. But I take a point about successes, and I think that through the SingHealth system, there were also a fair number of successes, as with SG innovate. SG innovate also had a fair number of successes coming out in the digital health space. So I think more success is good. And so from your side, because you are from clavis, this is Temasek backed fund. You know, what does success look like for you, for the med tech sector? Before coming

Speaker 1  25:51  
to that, to follow up interests point, I don't see that there will be a situation where we have global regulatory harmonization, but there's no reason why we cannot do it regionally. Singapore is a small domestic market, but this small domestic market is a regional or global test bit, and it could be a springboard to innovations regionally. But what we need is that regulatory harmonization in the region first, to reduce duplication in time, effort and cost to deploy and prove new care models, to what success looks like. I think we are very much in a phase where it's a work in progress. Success ultimately looks like impacting patient outcomes at scale and getting there requires a path towards clinical trial progress as proof points and proof of value towards commercialization, but ultimately, success will be proven by the impact of the innovation in impacting the outcomes of the population and patients.

Irene Cheong  26:55  
Yeah, thanks for that joy. Any final, final closing remarks from you as we run out of time on this panel,

Jui Lim  27:01  
just to come back to your magic wand thing, you know right now, I hope C and Trump get on that call. Let's put an end. Let's hope they make up. It's tough. I mean, for deep tech companies in general, right? Should I take this investor? Because if I take this investor, what is the other group of investors going to think, yeah, in some ways, we are benefiting from this, you know, stasis. But on the other I think it's really, it's making, you know, it's contributing to that funding, to the funding environment, you know, the situation with, you know, difficulty in raising money, yeah, so that would be my

Irene Cheong  27:42  
wish, yeah. I think many people also share your wish, and we're so grateful to LSI for bringing that first Asia Conference to Singapore. I think the nice thing about Singapore is that everybody can come to Singapore. And I think we know the way that we think about our role in global economics is that this is a place where deals get done, because actually, when deals get done internationally and there are no barriers to interaction, the world is really a better place. So on that note, I just have one last thing to do as my time runs out, to thank my lovely panelists and make a plug. We have another panel coming up that looks at scaling Medtech companies from Singapore. So if you can join us at 345 it's in the junior ballroom upstairs on the float floor. So a round of applause for my panelists. Thank you very much.