NEARLY half of the world's population still lacks access to even basic diagnostic tests. Currently, diagnostics account for only a tiny fraction of global health spending despite their central role in clinical decision-making. At the same time, the World Health Organization now treats access to medicines and health products as a core pillar of universal health coverage. This underscores that without affordable solutions, the wider population will never benefit from most medical innovations.
This global gap is especially acute in low- and middle-income countries, where underfunded laboratories, fragmented procurement, and high prices for patented therapeutics limit access to timely diagnosis and advanced treatment. In Malaysia, the latest in life-saving cancer treatments are out of reach for the average patient. While diagnostic tests for endemic diseases like dengue, monkey malaria and leptospirosis are unavailable in remote rural areas where they are most needed.
Universiti Malaya Affordable Diagnostics and Therapeutics (UMADT) is on a mission to change this. UMADT operates as a flagship research group under the International Affordable Diagnostics & Therapeutics Alliance (IA-Data), with an explicit mandate to bridge science, access and equity. With this partnership, UMADT positions Malaysia as a regional test bed for solutions to these systemic failures, with a deliberate focus on technologies that can be scaled in constrained settings rather than only in flagship urban hospitals.
UMADT is one of South-East Asia's first few interdisciplinary hubs dedicated to affordable diagnostics and drug repurposing, targeting unmet needs across cancer, infectious diseases, and inflammatory conditions. Crucially, UMADT functions as an academic platform for "quadruple helix" collaboration, bringing together universities, government agencies, industry, and civil society to co-design technologies, products, and policies. This structure allows research priorities to be informed not only by scientific novelty but also by regulatory realities, manufacturing capacity, and the lived experience of patients and front-line clinicians.
From lab to clinic, locally
On the diagnostics side, UMADT links WHO-aligned development frameworks with local infrastructure, including Malaysia's MyLisa platform for diagnostics and Health Ministry hospitals for validation via entities such as Clinical Research Malaysia, the Institute for Medical Research and the Institute for Clinical Research. This creates a pipeline where prototypes can be refined, clinically tested and prepared for regulatory and market pathways within the same ecosystem. UMADT is collaborating with international partners such as Global Access Diagnostics in the United Kingdom to further extend this model. For example, point-of-care test kits co-developed with such partners are being adapted for use in rural regions including Sabah and Sarawak. The goal is to manufacture these test kits locally to both lower costs and increase resilience of supply.
Drug repurposing as a development shortcut
On the therapeutics front, UMADT is investing heavily in drug repurposing, an approach that finds new indications for existing drugs instead of developing new drugs. Within IA-DATA's portfolio, Universiti Malaya is leading studies of the antimalarial artesunate as a potential treatment for cervical intraepithelial neoplasia and colorectal cancer, backed by PhD and MSc projects that dissect its mechanisms across cancer biology and infectious disease. Drug repurposing accelerates the timeline from research to treatment as the safety profiles, manufacturing processes, and supply chains for older drugs are already established. UMADT's work is feeding into broader efforts to create WHO-congruent guideline frameworks and a national roadmap for drug repurposing in Malaysia, including analysis of regulatory and market barriers. This focus on drug repurposing has the potential to not only benefit Malaysia, but also demonstrate the advantages of drug repurposing for the Asean region.
Beyond research, UMADT is also working on shaping Malaysia's national strategy for essential diagnostics and rational access to medicines. The group has convened roundtables on priority setting and pipeline mapping, hosted stakeholder meetings on topics like dengue diagnostics, and led workshops on pandemic-ready, point-of-care molecular tests for Asean countries. These dialogue sessions are essential to create a coherent national strategy that aligns with global initiatives on diagnostic access and affordable therapeutics. Locally, UMADT is working with government-linked companies (GLCs), local generic manufacturers, and regulators, to ensure that its innovations are deployable, scalable, and affordable.
As more low- and middle-income countries confront the dual challenge of non-communicable disease and emerging infections, the UMADT model offers a blueprint: invest in interdisciplinary hubs that are rooted in national systems, oriented to affordability from the outset and connected to global norm-setting and markets. If this experiment succeeds, its most important export may not be a single test or drug, but a new way of organising research so that scientific progress and social justice move in tandem.
Dr Ivy Chung is a Professor of Pharmacology based at the Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya. She is the lead Principal Investigator for the Universiti Malaya Affordable Diagnostics and Therapeutics program, a project under the umbrella of the International Affordable Diagnostics and Therapeutics Alliance. She has 15 years of experience in higher education teaching, research, and industry engagement.
The views expressed here are the author's own
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