LEGAZPI CITY - The Philippines needs a new high official to oversee the systematic mobilization of the country's vast biotechnology resources for national development, a legislator said.

"We must have a biotechnology czar, who will methodically harness our biotechnology assets in order to achieve breakthroughs in new medical therapies, agriculture and food science," Catanduanes Rep. Joseph Santiago (NPC) said.

Santiago made the statement shortly after a Filipino-American biotech firm, FilGen BioSciences Inc. (FGB), revealed that it is in the advanced stages of developing for clinical trials a cancer preventive-curative drug called Lunasin. A Filipino scientist at the University of California at Berkeley developed the drug.

Due to the promise of lunasin as a possible treatment for cervical, prostate and colon cancer, a publicly listed biotech company in the US is set to acquire FilGen via a stock swap, according to Dr. Ben de Lumen, a professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology.

"Right now, we do not even have an inventory of our vast biotech resources, which we suspect, remain largely underutilized," Santiago said, adding that the country has hundreds of public and private research and development (R&D) facilities and industrial laboratories, including those producing herbal medicine.