UKM To Set Up A Health Technopolis
By Saiful Bahri Kamaruddin
Pix Shahiddan Saidi
KUALA LUMPUR, 6 March 2015 – The National University of Malaysia (UKM) aims to set up Malaysia’s first ‘Health Technopolis’ at its medical and health campus here where medical research and development can be carried out through collaboration between researchers and the corporate sector.
Vice-Chancellor Prof Datuk Dr Noor Azlan Ghazali said it is currently mobilising its medical and health sciences faculties to merge and integrate their academic and research facilities, the hospitals and medical centres into an integrated health campus.
Launching the one-day 9th International Academic Conference in Otology, Rhinology and Laryncology (ORL) 2015 here today, he said the huge amount of data generated will become the basis for the creation of the UKM health technopolis.
ORL is the medical research and study of Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) conditions and he believed that data collected from ENT can generate value that will attract healthcare industries and manufacturers to become part of the health technopolis.
The vice-chancellor said UKM was the first university in the country to develop its own ENT training programme, the Masters of ORL-Head and Neck programme in 1984.
He welcomed healthcare firms and manufacturing companies to form research-intensive companies and move their entire collaborations to the health technopolis.
The inspiration for the health technopolis came from several such centres around the world, such as Cochlear Limited (Australia) that parked its entire operations into the University of MacQuarie campus in Sydney.
Prof Noor Azlan said he had also visited a technopolis in Ankara, Turkey where engineers and corporations are working together to innovate and manufacture new products.
Some 70 local and foreign speakers – among them senior and world-renowned ENT surgeons along with up and coming researchers – took part in the conference including the highly respected Prof Dr Jan E. Veldman, a founder-member of the conference inaugurated more than 30 years ago in the Netherlands.
President-Elect of the Malaysian Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngologists, Dr J Jeevanan; Chairman of the International Scientific Committee, Prof Stephen O’Leary and Chairman of the Organising Committee Prof Dato’ Dr Lokman Saim attended the conference.
