SUCCESS STORIES

A global pharmaceutical consortium is partnering Singapore’s PRECISE programme to harness one of Asia’s most diverse population health datasets and accelerate discoveries in precision medicine.

Understanding why diseases develop, and how they might be prevented, often requires looking beyond individual patients to patterns across entire populations. Globally, large-scale health studies are becoming a powerful tool for uncovering these patterns. In Singapore, a growing collaboration between public researchers and global pharmaceutical companies demonstrates how such efforts can accelerate the search for new treatments.

Precision Health Research, Singapore (PRECISE) and its flagship population study, PRECISE-SG100K, brings together genomic, clinical and lifestyle data from 100,000 participants across Singapore’s multi-ethnic population. At the end of 2025, PRECISE announced a pre-competitive collaboration with pharmaceutical companies including Alnylam, Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim and Novo Nordisk. These companies are working with Singapore’s researchers to deepen insights from this dataset and translate discoveries into new approaches for disease prevention and treatment.

“Industry partners bring many critical areas of expertise to the table,” said Professor Patrick Tan, Executive Director of PRECISE. “Examples include how to manufacture products at scale, channels for global distribution and insights into emerging healthcare trends and unmet medical needs, which can highlight new areas of opportunity to focus our research.”

The partnership reflects a broader shift in biomedical research. Complex health challenges increasingly require cooperation between academia, healthcare systems and industry. In Singapore, the Biomedical Sciences Industry Partnership Office (BMSIPO), a national platform hosted by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), helped bring together the partners behind this initiative, connecting international companies with local research expertise.

A platform for understanding Asian health

Population health studies have become a cornerstone of biomedical research, yet many global datasets remain heavily weighted towards populations of European ancestry. PRECISE-SG100K was designed to address this imbalance. The PRECISE-SG100K resource is a multi-ancestry Asian population cohort dataset drawn from 100,000 Singaporean residents across four major prospective population health studies.

Singapore’s population offers a distinctive advantage. Within a single national cohort, the study brings together data from Chinese, Malay and Indian communities, providing researchers with a rare opportunity to examine genetic diversity across major Asian ancestral groups.

Researchers involved in the programme analyse the anonymised datasets from the study, combining genomic information with clinical and lifestyle data to better understand the mechanisms underlying different diseases. These insights can help identify new biomarkers, improve risk prediction and reveal potential therapeutic targets.
To effectively translate these research insights into practical healthcare applications, collaboration with industry partners is key. In turn, the diversity of the dataset has also attracted global pharmaceutical companies seeking to improve the representation of Asian populations in their work.

“At Alnylam, we use human genetic data to guide the development of RNAi therapeutics that silence disease-causing genes,” said Paul Nioi, Senior Vice President of Research at Alnylam. “PRECISE-SG100K is enriched with populations of Asian ancestry who are often underrepresented in global genetic datasets. By leveraging this diversity, we aim to drive novel discoveries and accelerate the development of new medicines to serve patients globally.”

Discovery through collaboration

The partnership operates as a pre-competitive consortium, allowing participating companies to collaborate on foundational research while maintaining the flexibility to pursue their own downstream discoveries. This approach encourages the sharing of expertise and data in areas where collaboration can benefit the broader biomedical community.
The collaboration is also expanding the scope of the dataset. Among the initiatives under way is a large-scale proteomic analysis that will add a new layer of biological information to the cohort, further strengthening its value as a resource for biomedical discovery.

Researchers involved in the programme analyse anonymised datasets from the PRECISE-SG100K study, combining genomic information with clinical and lifestyle data to better understand the biological mechanisms underlying disease. These insights may help identify new biomarkers, improve risk prediction and reveal potential therapeutic targets.

Industry partners contribute both technical expertise and analytical experience gained from global research programmes. “Collaboration is essential to address diseases with limited treatment options by drawing on data from the broader research community,” said Jan Nygaard Jensen, Global Head of Computational Innovation at Boehringer Ingelheim. “This pre-competitive model works for us because it establishes a pharmaceutical consortium that shares the foundational work in order to generate deep translational insights to tackle complex diseases.”

Supercharging biomedical research

The collaboration underlines how Singapore’s biomedical ecosystem supports partnerships that span academia, healthcare and industry. PRECISE acts as a coordinating platform, bringing together researchers from different institutions while enabling collaboration with international companies.

Professor John Chambers, Chief Scientific Officer of PRECISE and Lead Principal Investigator of the SG100K study, noted that such partnerships bring new perspectives and capabilities into the research environment. “Industry partners bring a strong translational focus, helping ensure that scientific discoveries ultimately lead to improvements in patient care,” he said.
“BMSIPO has been foundational in bringing this partnership together,” Prof Chambers added. “Their ability to connect the right people at the right time, and to help craft agreements that are both robust and mutually beneficial, has been central to making the collaboration work.”

As the partnership progresses, insights from PRECISE-SG100K are expected to deepen understanding of diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular conditions and cancer—health challenges that disproportionately affect Asian populations.
“The pre-competitive consortium ensures diverse perspective and capabilities from clinical practitioners, academics researcher and drug developers,” said Joerg Lippert, Head of Model-Informed Drug Development at Bayer. “It will help to translate research results into solutions for patients.”