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Updated Tuesday, November 10, 2009 9:46 am TWN, CNA

Taiwan, Canada to collaborate on Asian pneumonia vaccine: institute

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- Taiwan will collaborate with Canada to develop a vaccine that will be able to protect Taiwanese people and other Asians from the pneumococcus bacteria that causes pneumonia, an official said Monday. “The cooperative project is expected to come to fruition in five to 10 years,” said Chi-Huey Wong, president of Academia Sinica, Taiwan's most prestigious research institution. Speaking to reporters after delivering opening remarks at a Taiwan-Canada workshop on glycoscience, Wong said pneumococcus is one of the major bacteria that can cause pneumonia.

While an existing Canada-manufactured pneumonia vaccine is also used in Europe, it is not necessarily effective in Asia because the structure of the Asian strain of the bacteria is different, Wong explained.

As quite a few Taiwanese children and elderly people have developed pneumonia after being infected with pneumococcus, Wong said, Taiwan looks forward to sharing Canada's outstanding technological expertise to produce a new vaccine suitable for use in Taiwan and other Asian countries.

“We plan to employ Canadian technology to manufacture a new vaccine based on the local bacteria strain,” Wong continued.

Touching on the ongoing glycoscience workshop, Wong said the two-day seminar focuses on two major themes — infectious disease diagnosis and drug synthesis and discovery. Wong, himself a famous scientist in the field, came up with the proposal to hold the workshop when he visited Canada's National Research Council last year to promote research collaboration between the two countries.

Noting that glycoscience has emerged as an important scientific topic, Wang said the workshop has brought together outstanding researchers from Taiwan and Canada to discuss a range of issues, including antibodies for treating asthma and allergies, as well as progress toward the design and development of lipopolysaccharide-based vaccines.

According to an Academia Sinica press statement, 90 percent of the proteins in the human body are glycoproteins, which are proteins coated with various kinds of sugar molecules.

It is known that all antibodies are glycoproteins and that most infections caused by viruses, and even the spread of cancer, often involve a carbohydrate compound interacting with certain glycoprotein receptors, the statement said, adding that the development of new tools to identify glycoproteins associated with cancer and other diseases is of current interest.

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