SeaX wants US drug trials run on Pinoy patients

A FREIND of Dr. Kid Parchariyanon in Thailand learned his wife had pancreatic cancer. The man is a billionaire. He took her to the top hospitals in Bangkok, a medical tourism hub with American board-certified doctors, and every one gave her five months. Their son searched with AI and found a cancer center at a US medical school. The family flew over, lived there for a year, and she came home without cancer.

Parchariyanon told me that story in Manila. His point was that the treatment existed. What the family paid for was reaching it in time.

He is a medical doctor who runs SeaX Ventures, a Bangkok- and US-based deep-tech fund that invests in American and European companies and brings them to Southeast Asia. In late September, he was in Manila, meeting hospitals. Thailand came first.

RISE and SeaX launched the Southeast Asia Health Innovation Hub in Bangkok on June 30. He told me it reaches 30 million patients through 50 Thai health systems, and he wants 40 million by December. The hub’s own announcement says more than 25 million. The published target is 100 million across the region.

Eleven Thai universities signed on, among them Mahidol, Chulalongkorn and Khon Kaen, along with the large private hospital groups and two government agencies. Parchariyanon calls the result a time machine.

He showed me the case he is proudest of, a menstrual pad with a diagnostic strip inside. You pull the strip, seal it and courier it to a laboratory, in place of a blood draw. The product is Qvin’s Q-Pad, one of TIME’s best inventions of 2024. Parchariyanon says SeaX has backed it since 2019 and introduced it to Bangkok Dusit in 2022. Thailand approved it in February 2023 to screen for cervical cancer, the second leading cause of cancer death in Thai women ages 15 to 44. The US cleared it only for a diabetes test in December 2023. The screening he says Thai women buy at a hospital or on Lazada is one an American woman cannot.

Parchariyanon thinks we could go faster than Thailand.

We are English-speaking, and he says trial protocols are in English because the data eventually goes to the US Food and Drug Administration. There are about 115 million of us, and close to 1,300 hospitals by his count. And he would point two decades of BPO discipline at clinical operations instead of back-office work.

On one point, he was careful. Clinical trials are not new here. Few of them bring new drugs and devices to Filipino patients, he says. Most of what runs now is investigator-initiated, started by a hospital’s doctors rather than a company with a product to sell.

Trials here are not abstract to me. I enrolled in one in Manila in 2022, a test drug for early Covid given over three days. Our doctors run these well. What Parchariyanon describes is a different category, a trial carrying a product a company means to register and sell.

The hub has not arrived here. Nothing is signed yet. He told me he is just getting started, that he spent the week meeting public and private hospitals, and that talking is not agreement. He would say only that they include a leading teaching hospital and university, and would not name them. The hub’s launch announcement puts the Philippines among the countries still in discussion, with onboarding expected to accelerate in the second half of this year.

His pitch says trials here cost a fifth of what they cost in the US. I asked whether that comes from lower fees for doctors, nurses and sites, and he said yes. The answer on recruitment speed was better than the brochure version. In a US hospital, he said, a research nurse offers a patient about 10 trials to pick from because companies compete for the same people. Here, fewer trials chase patients. It is still called a greenfield, he said.

A patient who has run out of options gets a drug she could not otherwise afford. One new cancer therapy, he said, runs roughly P30 million per treatment, free inside a trial. A patient with nothing left to try will say yes.

I asked who owns the data. Results go back to the US, he said, the sponsor does not own them, his side does, and the patient owns their own data and signs consent. Who his side is, and how that sits with our Data Privacy Act, never came up. I asked whether patients keep the treatment after a trial ends. Cancer patients get the full course, he said. What happens after that, he was less certain about. The hospital gets a fee to run the trial, he says, and so does the doctor.

Parchariyanon’s friend bought his wife a year in America. Most Filipino families cannot buy the ticket. Our hospitals should take the meeting. They should also settle, before anyone signs, who ends up holding the data and what happens to the patient after the last dose.