The Thailand Centre of Excellence for Life Sciences (TCELS) is expanding to attract more startups and draw venture capital firms from Europe to create at least five successful life science entrepreneurs here by 2021.
The move aims to strengthen the country's medical and healthcare industry in the effort towards Thailand 4.0.
"Life science and bioscience are among deep technologies growing globally that need extensive research to advance and are hard to be duplicated by others," said Patcharaporn Wongsa, acting director of the department of industry and investment strategy at TCELS.
TCELS has a 100-million-baht budget for 2017-21 allocated to Thailand Life Science Startup, the life science and med tech accelerator programme that is a collaboration of TCELS and business and financial sectors for incubation, system development and investment in startups to foster growth in the early and middle business stages.
TCELS supports companies in expanding their markets and building new bioscience and healthcare startups.
TCELS has cooperated with corporate venture capitals and business organisations like PTT, SCG and Bualuang Ventures, as well as international players Leave A Nest, an accelerator in Japan, and Mass Challenges, a Boston-based expert in startup entrepreneur incubation.
"We will partner with business and venture capital firms and have them be mentors and investors for life science startups," Ms Patcharaporn said.
Beginning a few years ago, she said, there were outstanding advances made by deep tech startups in medical devices and innovative cosmetics.
But the number of deep tech startups remains small, so TCELS will encourage overseas startups in life science and biotech to move and grow their businesses in Thailand.
TCELS targets startups in informatics that use artificial intelligence, natural products for cosmetics/supplements, medical devices and pharmaceuticals.
"Life science and healthtech require high capital investment in research and clinical tests, so matching the startups with big corporations will enable them to sell licences or go to market faster," Ms Patcharaporn said, adding that startups will function as R&D arms to large businesses.
She said TCELS aims to build five successful deep tech startups in life science and biotech out of 100 startups under this project by 2021.
Thailand's life science businesses were worth about 10 billion baht last year, but products are mostly imported.
TCELS joined hands recently with Mass Challenges to organise the Mentor and Startup boot camp to build bioscience mentors in Thailand and incubate rising startups in medicine and healthcare.
