Seoul Bio Hub (Director Hyunwoo Kim) announced that it held a signing ceremony for the '2025 Seoul Bio Hub-Daewon Pharmaceutical Open Innovation Program' with Daewon Pharmaceutical (CEO Seungyeol Baek) on August 28.
From May to July of this year, the two organizations recruited participating companies and selected two promising biotech startups possessing next-generation new drug development technologies. The selected companies are Kitech Bio (CEO Kim Gwan-muk) and Atomatrix (CEO Lee Eun-ho).
Kitech Bio possesses a proprietary, first-in-class technology called "FLIC," which binds anticancer drugs and other drugs to albumin. This technology binds to albumin, a major protein in the blood, extending drug retention time and facilitating effective delivery to the target site.
Atomatrix possesses the world's first commercialized "membrane protein pharmacological signal prediction platform" and a "protein-drug binding prediction platform" based on artificial intelligence (AI) and molecular dynamics. Combining these two platforms enables prediction of not only interactions between membrane proteins and drugs but also pharmacological effects, potentially saving time and money in the early stages of new drug candidate discovery.
Seoul Bio Hub will provide selected companies with infrastructure, including research space and shared equipment, and will collaborate with professional accelerators to provide customized support, including corporate diagnosis, technology and commercialization consulting, and domestic and international market validation.
Daewon Pharmaceutical, drawing on its years of pharmaceutical development experience and industry insights, evaluates the marketability and commercialization potential of startup technologies and provides feedback. Companies that achieve outstanding results are also offered the opportunity to participate in Daewon Pharmaceutical's open innovation program, the "The Ham Program."
Seoul Bio Hub is a bio-medical startup innovation platform established by the Seoul Metropolitan Government and jointly operated by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and Korea University. It supports the growth of bio startups through public-private cooperation and contributes to the creation of an open innovation ecosystem.
This program, which is being implemented for the second time following last year, is designed to discover startups with innovative technologies in the bio and medical fields, verify their technologies, and support their market entry.
Kim Hyun-woo, director of Seoul Bio Hub, said, “The collaboration with Daewon Pharmaceutical is establishing itself as a model case of the public and private sectors working together to grow promising startups,” and added, “We will continue to collaborate with various industrial partners to strengthen our support so that technologically advanced bio startups can create tangible market results.”
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