A Korean pharmaceutical company immersed in the development of AI drugs -

A boom in the development of new drugs based on artificial intelligence (AI) has erupted among Korean pharmaceutical companies.

Korean pharmaceutical companies are showing great interest in using AI to develop new drugs.

According to industry insiders, the AI platform makes the new drug development process stable and efficient.

The platform provides services such as data analysis based on extensive research data and hospital medical records accumulated over a long period of time and prediction of the efficacy of newly found drug candidates.

“The interest in using AI is quite new among Korean companies, as there were many observations before that such deep learning and AI platform technologies were not still in the stage of being used commercially,” said Lee Jun-soo, analyst for Prophet Asset Management. . “However, as the pace of development of AI technology has exceeded market expectations and technological perfection has greatly increased, a tendency to graft AI technology into all industries, including pharmaceutical industries , manufacturing, financial and service industries, has emerged.”

In this context, Korean pharmaceutical companies are also actively researching the use of AI technology.

In 2022 alone, not only large pharmaceutical companies such as Yuhan Corporation, Daewoong Pharmaceutical, HK inno.N, JW Pharmaceutical and Dong-A ST, but also medium to small enterprises such as Samjin Pharmaceutical, Dongwha Pharmaceutical, Kyungdong Pharmaceutical, Arlico Pharmaceutical, PharmGen Science, and Hyundai Pharmaceutical have partnered with AI platform companies and started developing new drugs.

Notably, three companies – Daewoong, Arlico and PharmGen – on Wednesday signed partnership agreements with AI platform companies.

Daewoong has signed a contract with AZothBio to research and develop a synthetic lethality cancer drug using artificial intelligence (AI).

Under the agreement, AZothBio plans to use its AI platform to research cancer drug candidates with synthetic lethality, and Daewoong Pharmaceutical plans to commercialize the candidates by conducting efficacy evaluation and further development. clinical.

Arlico has signed a commercial agreement with Basgen Bio, a genome-based AI drug development company, to develop a combination drug using an AI platform.

Basgen Bio will use DEEPCT, its AI drug development platform, to discover the optimal drug combination required to develop a new drug, and Arlico will verify the derived drug combination before proceeding with the necessary procedures for commercialization.

PharmGen has signed a joint research contract with AIGen Drug, an innovative drug development company based on an AI platform, to develop novel drugs for autoimmune diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). ), using AI.

As pharmaceutical companies show interest in developing new AI drugs, the government is also expanding its support in this area.

The Ministry of Science and ICT recently held a meeting to share and review the direction of the AI-based innovative new drug discovery project, and discussed ways to revitalize the new drug development ecosystem at the AI help with experts from industry, academia and research.

During the meeting, the ministry officials expressed their view that the new era of drug development 2.0 using the AI platform will come soon.

Using the AI platform, the government plans to establish a system that can discover new drug candidates and immediately use them for clinical trials and derive tangible results.

The government will select three new research projects from 2022 and 2023. Each research will promote the development of public AI platforms that can help the process of developing new drug candidates using AI.

After enhancing the convenience, accessibility and user-friendliness of the public platform, the government plans to deliver the completed platform by 2026.

“Once the public platform is activated, the development of new drugs using AI will not only spread to industry, but also to universities and research institutes, accelerating the development of innovative drugs in Korea,” Lee said. Chang-yun Lee, Director of R&D Policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT.