May 5, 2016 — Japanese professor and RIKEN Preventive Medicine and Diagnosis Innovation Program Director Dr. Yoshihide Hayashizaki gave a lecture on the FANTOM Technology and Hospital Upgrading Kit on May 4, 2016 in connection with a Memorandum of Understanding signed between UP Manila and RIKEN. Through the MOU, the two institutions will embark on development plans for a future ‘smart’ university hospital in Clark Green City (CGC), Pampanga.

CGC is the newest project in Central Luzon of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) in partnership with the Japan Overseas Infrastructure Investment Corporation for Transport and Urban Development (JOIN), converting the Sacobia area in Clark Freeport, Angeles Pampanga into a new urban area, about half the size of Metro Manila. Part of the project is the building of a UP campus in the planned city.

Quoting from from the speech of UP President Alfredo Pascual during the planning of the UP CGC campus, UPM Chancellor Carmencita Padilla said: “The expansion of the UP CGC campus will be in a radial pattern that will emanate from the core for innovation hubs and incubator laboratories, providing a hub-and-spokes model for regional development. In fact, the spokes-and-hub model is a framework that is being adopted nationally. Specialized facilities, such as a research core hospital that would be engaged in preventive medicine and disease control interventions, for example, could further encourage medical tourism.”

“The direction is, 10 years down the line, there will be a new hospital and a research facility,” affirmed Chancellor Padilla the plans of UP Manila to develop in CGC.

“It will be a next-generation hospital.” Chancellor Padilla stressed that the hospital will be different from PGH because of the technologies that will be introduced. Dr. Hayashizaki discussed that the envisioned hospital will operate in a medical IT infrastructure that will function in a seven P’s system approach: personalized, preventive, participatory, predictive, preemptive, precision, and point-of-care. The ‘smart’ hospital will feature technologies, such as electronic medical records (EMR), portable devices that enable remote diagnosis and therapy, simple diagnostic procedures with rapid detection, and medical simulation technology for the training of clinicians and students.

Dr. Hayashizaki introduced RIKEN as Japan’s largest comprehensive research institution, the counterpart of the US’ and Philippines’ NIH, renowned for high-quality research in a diverse range of scientific disciplines, with endeavors focused on research and the development of technologies that help improve society, particularly in health and medicine.

The RIKEN official described the FANTOM technology as an international research consortium that he and his colleagues established in 2000 to assign functional annotations to the full-length cDNAs that were collected during the Mouse Encyclopedia Project at RIKEN. This technology can be used in advancing the diagnosis of diseases. “This is just the beginning,” declared Dr. Hayashizaki on RIKEN’s partnership with UP Manila.

Charmaine Lingdas | Published in UP Manila Newsletter May – June 2016