MEDICAL BIOTECHNOLOGY COOPERATIVE CENTRE Overview Mission Statement Priority Areas Research Projects Who's Who Links Overview Considering factors such as time to market and costs of development, we have adopted a research strategy, which takes an integrated view of a number of disease groups such as cancers, parasitic diseases, virus infectious and emerging diseases. In planning a research programme around such disease groups we are taking both a short term and long term approach to commercialisation of biomedical products and processes. Thus, as an example, we are interested in many aspects of dengue haemorrhagic fever. A research programme designed to understand the pathogenesis of this disease has generated new knowledge from which we have spun off technologies which have been the basis of a number of essays have been commercialised into diagnostic kits. Other new knowledge generated has given us important insights into the determinants and mechanism of virus neutralisation. This will form the basis of the selection of consensus peptides , which will yield the basis of a vaccine against dengue fever and dengue haemorrhagic fever. Such short term and long term goals for each research programme allow us to have a staggered programme to take new products to market. The Medical Biotechnology Cooperative Centre (MDBCC) is located at two physical sites, at the Institute for Medical Research (IMR) in the Capital city of Kuala Lumpur, and at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) in the state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. The focus activities of each site reflect the local needs and take advantage of the strengths of each location, while at the same time carrying out activities, which will both stimulate and strengthen specific fields of medical biotechnology in the country. |