inp.polri.go.id - Jakarta. The Ministry of Health launched the Indonesia Clinical Research Center (INACRC) as an effort to transform and reform the national research system so that Indonesia can become one of the centers of clinical research in the Southeast Asia region.

Deputy Minister of Health (Wamenkes) Dante Saksono Harbuwono said that Indonesia has promising capital such as demographic advantages and genetic diversity, making Indonesia a suitable place for research and clinical trials.

"But this matter is not as simple as only having strong capital. We know that we have 300 national referral hospitals, but only about 15 percent of them have just started clinical trials," said the Deputy Minister of Health on Wednesday (10/16/2024).

He also compared it with other countries that conduct intensive clinical research, such as Thailand, which in the last decade has pursued this through the use of digital technology and international collaboration.

Thus, Dante hopes that INACRC can become a forum for conducting organized research and better collaboration with researchers who have brilliant ideas. Not only conducting research openly, but also to initiate and develop clinical research in hospitals in Indonesia. Dante adds that INACRC is also expected to facilitate multinational research.

One of the advantages of the research center, he said, is the development of precision medicine technology that adopts the use of artificial intelligence (AI), which can be a significant thing in research in Indonesia.

In addition to the launch of INACRC, other efforts to advance research in Indonesia are to simplify regulations and form a National Central Ethics Committee to accelerate the clinical trial approval process.

Additionally the Biomedical & Genome Science Initiative (BGSi) can also be used as a central laboratory for clinical trials from multinational studies.

The Deputy Minister of Health also targets that in the next five years INACRC will become a reference for multinational research. 

"Hopefully with INACRC, we can produce more, more research conducted by countries in Southeast Asia," concludes Dante.

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