GI Innovation sings MoU for a new biopharmaceutical development with Merck

-Accelerating for development of high expression cell line through combination of GI-SMART^TM  platform technology of GI Innovation and CHOZN® Platform of Merck 

-Expecting synergy of both companies for biopharmaceutical development using CHOZN® Platform, supplying subsidiary materials, education consulting, and etc.,.

 GI Innovation Co., Ltd. announced that it signed MoU for a biopharmaceutical manufacturing and development with Merck, a global science technology company.

Especially, Merck has maintained a close relationship with CDMO companies such as Samsung biologics, Binex, and etc., and is the first time having cooperation case with a domestic biotech company for supporting a biopharmaceutical manufacturing and development. Merck is known to evaluate in various pipelines and development knowhow of high expression CHO cell line of GI Innovation.

The MoU ceremony had progressed in the headquarters of GI Innovation and Jun-Ho Hong CEO, Young-Gyu Cho EVP, Young-Min Oh VP of GI Innovation, and Young-Suk Kim Head of Business Merck Life Science Solutions attended on 9^th.

Through this MoU both companies will plan to synergize biopharmaceutical development by utilizing Merck CHOZN® Platform, supplying badge, education consulting for researchers, and etc.,.

Merck’s CHOZN platform is a platform for developing high productivity and stable production cell line without gene amplification that causes instability in production cell line.

In fact, in order to produce biopharmaceuticals using CHO cell line, it needs a long period (3~8 month), development techniques and expensive large- scale equipment to reduce the risk of external pollution.

Merck`s CHOZN platform can provide quality and productivity strong cell line development, customized production badge development services and etc., that can quickly access biopharmaceutical production processes.

Therefore, GI Innovation expects to accelerate the high  expression cell line through close combination of its GI-SMART^TM platform technology and CHOZN platform. Previously the process of producing was difficult due to the large-scale of multi-specific recombinant protein.

Furthermore, this could raise productivity of bio pharmaceutical development, reducing time and cost through smooth supplying of various subsidiary.

Jun-Ho Hong CEO of GI Innovation said, “Both technologies, technology of GI Innovation and bioprocessing technology of Merck will be possible to reduce time and cost of biopharmaceutical manufacturing and development. It is not a major company, but the first cooperative model with biotech in Korea, so I hope that the synergy between the two companies will produce good outputs."

Young-Suk Kim, head of business Merck Life Science business said, “Merck will support the process of a new bispecific protein drug of GI Innovation and aims to accelerate access to cancer and allergy drugs by patients around the world. We expect that we can supply required solution to solve problems across the board, a new drug development process to customer through Merck’s professionalism on bioprocessing development.”