People and state-run health agencies have joined a fundraising drive, enabled by social media to help Chulalongkorn University researchers continue their ambitious 1.5-billion-baht research project to develop a new anti-cancer drug.
The project hopes to develop an anti-cancer drug in a bid to replace costly imported medicines.
The project became the talk of the town when a post on social media asking for donations went viral. The post mentioned that researchers only needed 5 baht from each citizen to develop the new anti-cancer drug.
If successful, patients who currently pay 200,000 baht for cancer medicines, required every three weeks for a two-year term, will see the costs drop sharply to 20,000 baht.
Nopphon Chuenklin, chief of Health Systems Research Institute (HSRI), said in a press conference on Friday that the HSRI had granted 10 million baht to the research team.
"This will be progress for the healthcare system and provide new hope for patients," said Mr Nopphon.
Cancer treatment is known for its prohibitive costs, which can range anywhere between 8 and 10 million baht.
The research conducted by the team at the Faculty of Medicine is using a technique called "immunotheraphy".
The technique makes use of the human immune system to combat cancer rather than relying on traditional treatments such as surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, which can lead to severe side effects.
It is also the same method for which US researcher James Allison and Japanese researcher Tasuku Honjo won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Since medicine derived from the immune system can also be pricey, especially if it is imported, the local research team hopes to use the same technology to produce an affordable local variant.
