AI allows the industry to save the time and costs of the new medicine development - competitive advantages in the market
Daewoong Pharmaceutical's subsidiary develops treatment for difficulty in hearing with an AI company specializing in new medicine development
SK Chemical & Dr. Noah Biotech research and develop the AI new medicine together
[Segye Biz = Correspondent Kim Min-ji] South Korea's pharmaceutical industry comes forward with new medicine development using artificial intelligence (AI) in full scale.
If they use AI, they can drastically reduce the cost and time of research and development (R&D) for new medicine. The development of new medicine is a long-term project that requires more than ten years on average and a huge investment worth KRW 1 to 3 trillion.
Experts diagnose, "Using AI, we can drastically reduce the cost and time of developing a new medicine," and "we can collect and analyze the vast amount of data through AI and predict side effects."
According to the pharmaceutical industry, on the 7th, iN Therapeutics, a subsidiary of Daewoong Pharmaceutical has joined hands with "Deargen," a company specializing in AI new medicine development, to discover new medicine candidates’ substances for the treatment of difficulty in hearing.
In October, the two companies signed a joint research contract to discover new medicine to treat difficulty in hearing and speed up to derive candidate substances.
Deargen holds the AI platform technology that discovers disease targets and biomarkers with genetic data and predicts complex and protein combinations to derive medicinal substance candidates.
If Deargen proposes an optimization structure of leading substances using this technology, iN Therapeutics will synthesize and verify them using its ion channel platform technology.
SK Chemicals signed “A joint research and development agreement for AI-based new medicine development” with Dr. Noah Biotech, the AI-based new medicine development company, on the 27th of last month.
Under this agreement, the two companies will discover the next-generation candidate substances and complex new medicine based on the AI platform owned by Dr. Noah Biotech.
SK Chemicals is currently working with AI new medicine developers, including Deargen and Dr. Noah Biotech, this year. Dr. Noah Biotech is a startup that directly develops treatments for neurological and muscular diseases by using artificial intelligence technology.
It has completed the investment of KRW 5.5 billion in Series A this year, aiming to enter global clinical trials for the first time in a year.
Dr. Noah Biotech holds a platform technology called ARK (an ark) that integrates and analyzes literature information, genomic information, and structural information to develop treatments.
"This agreement is significant in that AI platform technology can be used to develop a new medicine," an SK Chemical official said. "We expect it to be a breakthrough in terms of the development of treatments for incurable diseases."
