WHEN Albert Tseng, head of the scientific advisory board of the
Melbourne-based drug company, Analytica, went to Taiwan five years ago, he
thought it was “like the old Wild West”. The island nation’s pharmaceutical
industry was primitive, consisting mainly of makers of generic “me-too” drugs.
There was no notion of how to take a compound from basic research through to a
finished product.
Amid the dross, however, Tseng found gold nuggets waiting to be refined. At a
retreat, scientists from Taiwan’s leading research institutes took Tseng aside
and showed him a compound they extracted from the bark of a local…
