channelnewsasia.com
Singapore moves to accelerate healthcare innovations in push to be regional clinical research hub
SINGAPORE: Singapore aims to become one of the most trusted and efficient places in the region for clinical research and evidence generation, said Minister for Health Ong Ye Kung on Monday (Oct 12) as he announced several moves to speed up regulatory processes for drug development and trials. To this end, Mr Ong said the Health Sciences Authority’s (HSA) efforts will span the healthcare value chain, connecting areas such as clinical development, regulation, health technology assessment and patient access. Among several moves, he announced a new HSA-Agency for Care Effectiveness (ACE) priority track that will allow selected health products to undergo regulatory evaluation and health technology assessment at the same time. Another initiative involves a collaboration with the United Kingdom for a new "regulatory innovation corridor" to consider breakthrough therapies, including those that use artificial intelligence (AI) in drug development and clinical trials. These initiatives, including HSA's plan to streamline regulatory review processes, could halve approval times for selected lower-risk Phase 3 clinical trials from 30 days to 15 days, as well as shorten the time for the first health technology assessment decision from about one year to between six and nine months after regulatory approval. Mr Ong said that...
![4. Discussion
This study makes three contributions. First, it extends the emerging concern around datacenter
scale and proximity to urban populations by showing that the location of the electricity generation
serving these facilities is itself a public-health consideration [1,6,31].
Second, the two-scenario comparison distinguishes the implications of electricity-supply pathway
from those of datacenter size: in the hypothetical matched-demand scenario, the modeled grid-supply
pathway produced greater additional exposure to PM2.5 and consequently greater excess annual
mortality that affects a large geographical area, whereas the BTM pathway concentrated mortality
closer to the datacenter. Moreover, in the real-world scenario, C2’s substantially greater capacity
produced greater absolute regional and near-site excess exposure to PM2.5 and excess mortality under
the specified operating assumptions. The generation-weighted sensitivity substantially reduced the
estimated grid-related mortality burden but did not change the matched-demand ordering or the much
greater near-site concentration of the BTM burden (Sec 3.4). Thus, the magnitude of the grid-related
burden is specific to how the electricity-system response is represented and, for the primary analysis,
to the 2023 TVA marginal generation response. It should not be generalized to regions with different
marginal generation mixes.
Third, the equity analysis shows that these spatial differences can translate into different population distributions of burden, with the largest BTM-attributable mortality share occurring in the
low-income, high-people-of-color stratum. These findings show why electricity demand or emissions
intensity alone cannot describe the health implications of datacenter power](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:66lbtw2porscqpmair6mir37/bafkreici5prebpmhzqj343bp7uxt2iwahuyh4txbzunkosbt75e42gbtpe)
