(SINGAPORE) The National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS) is looking for greater scope to increase its foreign patient load, in a bid to increase its funding for research.

In an interview with BT recently, NCCS director Soo Khee Chee said that increasing the proportion of foreign patients at the centre would help build up its funding pool. 'It will help,' he said. 'But we have to create a mechanism that ensures that even as we increase the number of private and foreign patients, the care and the performance matrix for the subsidised patients are not compromised. And that's what we continually wrestle with.'

Set up in 1999, the NCCS has the biggest aggregation of oncologists under one roof in Singapore. It houses 89 doctors, of whom 70 are specialists.

There is also a pool of 160 researchers - roughly a quarter of its total workforce - doing research work that may be broadly classified into three groups: medical sciences, which look at fostering translational research; clinical trials and epidemiological sciences to maintain databases and conduct biostatistics studies; and cellular and molecular research for exploring ways to prevent, diagnose and treat human cancers.

'Cancer research is very important for us because, firstly, the cancers in Singapore are sometimes peculiar to this part of the world and may not necessarily be of high priority in the Western world,' explained Professor Soo. 'For example, nose cancers and liver cancers. They may be very important in this part of the world but they may be of lesser importance to the US or UK, where nose cancer is very infrequent . . . so they are under-researched there.'

Currently, the centre has an annual research budget of about $20 million. Of that, roughly $3 million comes from endowment and the rest from institutional block grants and competitive grants won from the National Medical Research Council (NMRC) and the Biomedical Research Council (BMRC).

More recently, the centre received a $20 million pledge from Mavis Khoo-Oei, chairman of the Goodwood Group of Hotels, to set up the Humphrey Oei Institute of Cancer Research, in memory of her late husband, who died of cancer in 1999.

Even then, Prof Soo thinks that there is a need to raise the support for research funding. 'We find it very easy to ask the public to support poor patients, because emotionally, it's very appealing,' he said. 'And (when it comes to research) many people feel that research should be supported by the government. 'But in any credible research institution, discretionary funding that comes from endowment tends to be at 30-40 per cent of their research budget. In other words, there's never enough from government.

'And we should have sufficient discretionary funds to move, because sometimes the mechanics of getting government funding from BMRC, NMRC, is slow. If we've got good researchers we want to recruit, if we have good research ideas, or if we have researchers running out of money and who require bridging funds, all these is when the discretionary funds would become useful.'

One of the many benefits of research is improved clinical outcomes. For instance, as a result of a six-year study on nose cancer, NCCS found that the five-year survival rate could be raised to 75 per cent if both radio and chemotherapies were applied in treatment.

This was a better outcome than the 50 per cent survival rate when the conventional treatment of only radiotherapy was applied. Prof Soo is aiming to raise the centre's annual research budget to $30-40 million. Considering that it generates some $80 million in revenue and $1-2 million in income a year, the subvention would be 38-50 per cent of its overall revenue.

He hopes that part of that increase will come from donors and a part from the higher margins generated from more visits by foreign patients.