VietNamNet Bridge - Dr. Phan Toan Thang is honored as the father of the technique of grafting stem cells from the umbilical cord to heal wounds caused by burns, diabetes and many other diseases.

Dr. Phan Toan Thang

He is the co-founder of the Cellresearch Corp biotechnology company worth $700 million in Singapore.

Dr. Thang graduated from the Military Medical University in Hanoi in 1991 and began his career at the National Burn Institute of Vietnam.

"At that time I had no time, no money to fool around. So I just focused on studying. Worked very hard, learnt Russian, learnt English," he told The Straits Times of Singapore.

In 1995, he went on a fellowship to Oxford University in the UK. It was a move that eventually led him to his successful life in Singapore.

While at Oxford, he met a Singaporean who put him in touch with the head of plastic surgery at the burn unit at Singapore General Hospital (SGH) then, Professor Lee Seng Teik. Prof Lee offered Dr. Thang a job on his team in 1997 and he was tasked with healing wounds and creating skin cells.

"We had to take the skin cells from the patient's un-burnt area and expand them in the lab, and put it back on them. It wasn't scalable. The whole process was very expensive. We only could do it for some patients - it was very difficult to sustain," Dr. Thang said.

About a year later, he met Dr. Ivor Lim and Gavin Tan, the co-founders of Cellresearch Corp later. Together, they focused on understanding scar formation. In 2001 and 2002, Dr. Thang won awards for identifying a function in surface skin that causes scarring.

At the time, research was being done using stem cells from embryos, which raised many red flags. By focusing on the umbilical cord, Dr. Thang Phan sidestepped the touchy topic.

In 2002, the same year Cellresearch Corp was founded, Dr. Thang went to the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, at Stanford University in the US, which he was collaborating with.

In the two years there, he discovered that researchers were trying to separate stem cells from the placenta for liver repair.

When he returned to Singapore in 2004, he decided to experiment with the placenta and umbilical cord. At the time, stem cells found in umbilical cord blood were already being used to help cure patients of diseases such as leukemia, and other blood cancers and disorders. He said he has CEO Gavin Tan to thank for getting the ball rolling.

It was Tan who gave him two bottles to experiment with, one holding a placenta and one with an umbilical cord, after his wife gave birth. He tried the placenta first, and realized quickly that that the blood it came with made it too contaminated to work with. He took a break in his lab, and had a "eureka" moment, which eventually changed his life.

He said: "I turned my eye to the next bottle, which had the umbilical cord floating in there. It was very clean and there was no blood contamination - white in color, floating beautifully in the bottle with the preservative medium."

He failed several times to perfect the medium, a proprietary combination of sugars and proteins that keep the tissue in the umbilical cord alive, and decontaminating it at the right level.

"Back then, I lived in the lab. I turned off my phone and my wife used to go crazy," he said. He would even rush to the lab if he had a sudden idea on how to make it work.

"Back then, no one cared about skin. They were focusing on cancer and heart problems. We were just quietly doing it," he said.

Dr. Thang is currently an associate professor at the department of surgery at the National University of Singapore's Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and the co-founder of Cellresearch Corp.

He turns the umbilical cord, which is considered medical waste, into a potential source of supply of 6 billion stem cells, which can create new skin and bone, and even other body parts, such as the cornea in the eye.

Thang’s Cellresearch Corp, after over 10 years of operation, now owns 39 patents worldwide. They include patents for extracting stem cells from umbilical cord lining, banking and cultivating them, and for therapeutic applications. The company is now worth $700 million.

Work is under way for the technology to be approved by the globally recognized United States Federal Drug Administration (FDA), he told The Straits Times at his workplace, a 3,000 sq ft lab in Ayer Rajah Crescent. The cells are being manufactured in Denver and the first clinical trial on patients is expected to start early next year.

"Non-healing wounds are a big medical burden everywhere. They are associated with diabetes, stroke, heart problems and aging," he said, explaining the importance of the technology, which can make it affordable for patients to get skin grafts.

Dr. Por Yong Chen, vice-chairman of the board of the Chapter of Plastic, Reconstructive & Aesthetic Surgeons, said FDA approval would put Singapore on the map.

"Wound healing is a big market, especially because of diabetics," he said. "This is a significant breakthrough. I think a lot of people are going to try to do the same thing."

Despite his achievements and a company worth $700 million, Dr. Thang is humble: "There were many challenges in moving forward to perfect a product, and to make it inexpensive enough for everyone to use. It's not easy. But luckily, we managed to do it."

The Straits Times/VietNamNet