Singapore: National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), southern Taiwan, and Fujitsu Taiwan have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for building a platform of genomics and bioinformatics research to jointly promote computational biology, cultivate personnel training for bioinformatics, and develop biology analysis software.

Dr Hwung-Hweng Hwung, president of NCKU, and Ikegami Ichirou, general manager of Fujitsu Taiwan, signed the MOU on behalf of their respective organizations.

With a solid engineering research of NCKU, which helps promote the application of genetics study, the input from Fujitsu, a leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company, and the prospective NCKU genomics and bioinformatics research platform are expected to enlarge NCKU's role in global genetics research.

With the MOU, the cooperation between NCKU and Fujitsu will be escalated to another level as their partnership will strengthen the collaboration among academia, industry, and government in Taiwan and Japan.

In his welcoming speech, President Hwung of NCKU said that NCKU's partnership with Fujitsu is based upon shared benefits and strong collaborations. Under the MOU, both parties will establish a platform to help develop genomics research.

Ikegami Ichiro pointed out that NCKU is the first university in Taiwan Fujitsu has looked forward to cooperating with.

NCKU has many distinguished researchers in the biological field and well-rounded research environment, he said. "NCKU's research on genomics and the original species of Taiwan has shown great achievement and its extensive relations with world-renowned scientific institutes are fruitful in collaborated results."

The initial cooperation between NCKU and Fujitsu will focus on nurturing talents, followed by data collecting of Taiwan original species and the personnel training for biology data analysis, according to Chi-Chuan Hwang, chair professor of NCKU Engineering Science.

Fujitsu and NCKU will jointly build a research platform of genomics and bioinformatics, explore the important genomics research issues, and share R&D results.