Most people feel uneasy at the sight of mice, but breeding them for laboratory uses is actually good business. Every trade has its master, and in Taiwan there is a company that stands out: Biolasco Taiwan Co. Ltd.—the sole local supplier of lab animals.
Almost all biotech companies and major academic institutions in Taiwan buy lab mice from the company, whose customers also come from India and mainland China. According to the Humane Care of Laboratory Animals annual report published by the Cabinet-level Council of Agriculture, Taiwan uses 670,000 rodents as lab animals annually, 58 percent of which are provided by Biolasco.
But not a single mouse can be seen in the company’s headquarters in Taipei City. This is because the lab mice, each of them can easily fetch NT$1,000 (US$33), are all bred in a standard plant in the Yuanshan Township of northeastern Taiwan’s Yilan County.
Boasting an area of 5,300 square meters, the plant cost NT$150 million to build. The facility, which keeps 21 breeds of mice, is closely guarded, off-limits to the public.
Colin Chen, president and general manager of Biolasco, said animal tests are indispensable in the process of developing a new drug, which usually lasts more than 10 years. Thanks to their small size and reproductive ability, mice are deemed a top choice as lab animals.
“In earlier years, schools bred lab mice on their own as there were no major suppliers of the rodents,” Chen said. “A lack of funding and equipment negatively affected the quality of these mice.”
Chen, 68, a food science major graduating from the forerunner of National Taiwan Ocean University in Keelung City, northern Taiwan, has devoted his life to the biotechnology industry since it started emerging in Taiwan. In 1976, having seen a business opportunity in the building of labs, he founded Tseng Hsiang Life Science Ltd., which was run mainly as a dealer of lab equipment.
At the time he worked with Charles River Laboratories, the world’s largest provider of related products and services, in introducing lab equipment to Taiwan. In 1994, he began to cooperate with the newly established Taipei-based National Laboratory Animal Center in creating a network for providing lab mice. As the market matured, Chen decided to establish Biolasco in May 2001, which was tasked with supplying lab mice produced by his own factory.
At the time of this factory’s establishment, there were no rules in Taiwan regulating how to breed lab animals or how such facilities should be designed. Biolasco subsequently sent two researchers to the U.S. for a three-month training session. It also funded trips made by veterinarians and architects responsible for building the factory, in hopes of learning how to build such a facility based on American standards.
In 2007, Biolasco was fully accredited by the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International. “The company brought everything that met international standards to Taiwan,” a researcher who once worked for Biolasco said.
As environmental conditions play a crucial role in the breeding of lab animals, strict operating procedures must be followed. It is not unusual to ask staffers to shower and change clothes, including underwear, before they enter a lab. But at Biolasco, one can even see a notice that tells one how much time should spend taking a shower: “Three minutes for hair and 15 in total.”
But Chen concedes that the biotech market in Taiwan is not big enough and it has reached saturation point. Six years ago he started to look to India as an expansion market for lab animals as he found major international enterprises beginning to explore the South Asian country, setting up R&D departments one after another.
After studying the Indian market closely for years, Chen decided to found in 2015 a subsidiary in the so-called Genome Valley located in southern India’s Hyderabad. “This nation is so vast you are unlikely to cover it all through a single branch, which deals with about 25 percent of the Indian market,” he said, adding that the company plans to establish another three lab animal breeding centers around India.
With the rise of Association of Southeast Asian Nations member states, Biolasco set up in 2016 a branch Thailand to function as a hub of the company’s business in the region.
In 2017 National Laboratory Animal Center commissioned Biolasco to sell its genetically modified lab mice in Southeast Asia. NLAC Director Yu Chun-chiang said the center chose to work with Biolasco because of the network of sales channels built by the company.
According to Chen, the growing demand for lab animals owes much to the rising global trend for precision medicine. Precision medicine means prescribing medications according to the genetic content of individual patients. In the past, the same medicines were prescribed for all lung cancer patients and therefore all lab mice in a medical test had the same genetic content. Today lung cancer patients take different drugs because they differ genetically from each other. This means more lab mice are needed because research work involves using mice varying in genetic content.
Biolasco went public Jan. 4 with its stock trading at NT$32 per share. When asked why he entered the capital market when biotech stocks overall were disappointing in 2017, Chen said he did so because the company would establish factories both in India and Thailand in the future and needed more capital and funds to recruit talent. Chen, forthright by nature, is still quite optimistic when talking about his company’s development strategy and the global lab animal market. (E) (By Tsai Li-hsun / tr. by Oscar Chung)
(This article first appeared in February in Taipei City-based monthly magazine Global Views.)
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