Adding AI to K-Bio
Park Young-min, Head of Korea Drug Development Fund: "Intensive Support to Cross the Valley of Death"

[비즈한국] The wave of AI (artificial intelligence) is sweeping across all industries. Integrating AI into almost every area of business management, not to mention daily life, has become a necessity rather than a choice. The pharmaceutical and bio industry is no exception. With the government announcing its plan to foster the ‘ABCD (AI, Bio, Culture, Defense)’ industries as the next generation of national growth pillars, the convergence of AI and bio is no longer a distant future. We examine the changes AI is bringing to the pharmaceutical and bio industry, from research and development to clinical trials and production, and the challenges in providing institutional support for these advancements.

The Korea Drug Development Fund (KDDF) operates a pan-ministerial national R&D project initiated by three ministries—the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, and the Ministry of Health and Welfare—to enhance the global competitiveness of the domestic pharmaceutical and bio industry. It supports the entire cycle of new drug development, from discovering drug candidates to market launch. The fund supports approximately 100 national projects each year, serving as a cradle for new drug development by pharmaceutical and bio companies.

Launched in January 2021, the 10-year project has now passed its midpoint of the first phase. The KDDF conducted a survey of principal investigators and researchers participating in support projects as part of its strategy formulation for the second phase of its R&D portfolio and performance achievement goals. It plans to actively incorporate these results into the second phase of the project starting next year.

As the government has recently emphasized the use of AI, the importance of AI in projects open for application by the fund is expected to grow. Traditional new drug development methods take 10–15 years and cost a total of $2.6 billion (3.835 trillion KRW). Using AI is predicted to reduce the timeline to 3–4 years and lower costs to one-fifth of the traditional amount. In particular, it is expected that the initial discovery and preclinical periods can be significantly shortened from 4–7 years to 1 year.

Park Young-min, Head of the Korea Drug Development Fund, stated, "The survey confirmed that domestic AI drug development is concentrated in the initial stages," adding, "We will maintain a ‘bottom-up’ project-centered support system to help excellent ideas grow into global new drugs, and actively identify and support new drug development projects with high efficiency and success rates through AI." The goal is to back AI drug development efforts by providing funding to pharmaceutical and bio companies in the 'Valley of Death'—the stage where they face shortages in capital and manpower while transitioning to clinical and commercialization phases.

What are the shortcomings in the domestic pharmaceutical and bio industry’s use of AI? Director Park emphasized the need to strengthen infrastructure. He explained, "The difficulties in AI drug development are attributed to the absence of specialized AI management personnel, insufficient capacity for additional experimental verification of AI application results, lack of trust in AI technology maturity, lack of criteria and evaluation capabilities for selecting suitable AI development partners, and the burden of introduction costs," adding, "We will strengthen our role in overcoming bottlenecks in AI adoption in cooperation with the industry to facilitate the transition to new drug development."

He also pointed out the need to build national-level big data infrastructure and create an ecosystem for data sharing. Director Park explained, "Compared to various AI-based new drug development achievements overseas, such as in the U.S., there is a gap in terms of the quantity, quality, and standardization level of training data, technology maturity, and supporting linked programs," noting, "It is crucial to secure verifiable platforms and share successful and failed experimental data held by domestic developers."

Beyond the fund, the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the Ministry of Science and ICT are also expanding support for AI drug development through large-scale national projects to ensure that AI-driven new drugs emerge domestically. On the 5th of last month, the Ministry of Health and Welfare selected the Korea Pharmaceutical and Bio-Pharma Manufacturers Association as the lead organization for the ‘K-AI New Drug Development Preclinical/Clinical Model Development Project’ and plans to involve pharmaceutical and bio companies such as Hanmi Pharmaceutical128940, Daewoong Pharmaceutical069620, and Samjin Pharmaceutical005500. The goal is to invest approximately 37.1 billion KRW over 4 years and 3 months to build and develop an AI-based clinical trial design and support platform, and to create an end-to-end AI drug development ecosystem by linking preclinical and clinical stages.

On October 31st, the Ministry of Science and ICT selected a consortium led by Lunit328130 and a consortium led by KAIST as project teams for the ‘AI Specialized Foundation Model.’ They plan to support each with 256 Blackwell units (13.8 billion KRW) to develop a multi-scale medical science-specialized foundation for end-to-end medical science innovation and a ‘next-generation bio foundation model’ that precisely predicts key molecular structures of life phenomena.