Speech by Professor Subra Suresh, President & Distinguished University Professor of NTU Singapore, at the launch of the Centre for Microbiome Medicine

Speech by

Professor Subra Suresh
President & Distinguished University Professor

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Launch of Centre for Microbiome Medicine

Wednesday, 14 September 2022, 11:00am

Medical Library, Clinical Sciences Building

Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine

Mr George Yeo, Founding Patron of the Asia Competitiveness Institute, and Visiting Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy;

Ms Petrina Leong, Ms Sandy Leong, and Mr Jimmy Leong, representing the family of the late Madam Wang Lee Wah;

Professor Joseph Sung, Distinguished University Professor, Dean of Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, and Senior Vice-President (Health & Life Sciences) at NTU,

Friends, partners, colleagues,

Ladies and gentlemen,

 

Good morning. Today is a special day for us in the NTU family, and the academic and healthcare fraternity, as we celebrate the launch of the new Centre for Microbiome Medicine at NTU’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine).

Microbiome: New frontier in medicine

Microbiomes play an important role in human health and disease.  We know that trillions of bacteria, fungi, and viruses live on and inside each one of us. Our interaction with these microbes is important for our health, and they affect our physiology and predisposition to disease.

Scientists today are just beginning to understand how these ecosystems interact with each other and influence their environments and the human body. New technologies such as mass genetic sequencing and the ‘omics’ technologies used for microbiome analysis have catapulted microbiome into an exciting new frontier in medicine.

With today’s launch, faculty and researchers at the Centre for Microbiome Medicine will aim to translate key findings from their research into new clinical applications and therapeutics to improve prevention, diagnosis, or drug response. This can be particularly significant for certain diseases. For instance, microbiome medicine may potentially treat and prevent diseases and conditions that correspond with changes in the microbes of our gut, including type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, lung and skin diseases, and certain cancers.

Microbiome medicine can also open the door to a new age of personalised medicine. In future, doctors can potentially analyse each patient’s DNA plus their microbiome’s DNA and use bioinformatics and artificial intelligence to deliver a perfect prescription, personalised to each individual’s unique health needs, from diet and supplements to medicines and lifestyle advice.

Microbiome and the Environment

Another exciting new area that the new Centre will study is the human microbiome’s complex relationships with the environment, and how these interactions may contribute to disease.

This knowledge could revolutionise the way scientists test new chemicals for toxicity. Such insight may also lead to better prevention and treatment strategies for diseases that have environmental causes. From air pollutants to food and water contaminants, and even climate change – all these have major effects on our health. Urbanisation also creates fragments in the ecological balance and increases interactions between pathogens and their hosts. All these may potentially lead to another pandemic like COVID-19, and we should strive to avoid and mitigate these risks.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration

To deal with such complexities, microbiome medicine needs multiple disciplines to work together to find solutions. The new Centre, located at NTU’s LKCMedicine, is well placed to support this type of research, bring together diverse talents, and stimulate new and exciting collaborations.  

The Centre will leverage on NTU’s unique strengths and interdisciplinary collaboration, and this is very much in line with the NTU 2025 strategic plan to address some of humanity’s grand challenges and support Singapore’s efforts to improve and promote healthy living.

The Centre is expected to bring together local and international experts in the gut, lung, skin, and environmental microbiome to work closely with our key partners at National Healthcare Group, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and other academic and healthcare institutions.

As microbiome research requires large-scale genetic sequencing and analysis, there will be fresh opportunities for collaborations between medicine and other disciplines, such as computer science and bioengineering. For example, scientists and engineers at NTU will work with the Centre using state-of-the-art metabolomic infrastructure and digital molecular technologies. This interdisciplinary approach personally resonates with me as an engineer who has worked across different research fields, including biomedicine, through the years.

Leong family’s gift of S$2.5 million

In conjunction with today’s launch, I am pleased to announce that Ms Petrina Leong, Ms Sandy Leong, and Mr Jimmy Leong have pledged a gift of S$2.5 million to this new Centre. The Leongs are children of the late Madam Wang Lee Wah, who passed away in 2021, after a long illness. Madam Wang was a patient of Dr Ronald Ng, who is a mentor of Professor Joseph Sung.

In giving to the new Centre, they hope that its microbiome research will bring wide-reaching benefits and positive impact on the health of our community and the wider world. Please join me in thanking the Leong family.

In closing, I would like to express my best wishes to the new Centre for Microbiome Medicine. I wish the Centre every success, and I hope it will become one of the world’s top centres for microbiome medical research and innovation in time to come.

Thank you.