[Asia Economy Reporter Hyungsoo Park] Microbial diagnostic company Quantamatrix has surged for two consecutive days. It appears that the news of Professor Seonghoon Kwon’s research team at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Seoul National University, developing the world’s first technology capable of purifying hundreds of billions of types of nucleic acids with high resolution (single-base level) is influencing the stock price. Quantamatrix was founded in 2010 by CEO Seonghoon Kwon, who is a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Seoul National University. He earned his Ph.D. in bioengineering from UC Berkeley in 2004. After returning to Korea and working as a professor, he wrote a paper on technology to reduce the time for antimicrobial susceptibility testing. He applied microfluidic control technology used in semiconductor process technology. This is the foundation of Quantamatrix’s innovative product, dRAST.
As of 9:19 AM on the 2nd, Quantamatrix is trading at 19,950 KRW, up 3.37% from the previous day.
Recently, Professor Seonghoon Kwon’s research team at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Seoul National University, announced the development of “ultra-parallel high-purity nucleic acid (DNA/RNA) purification technology.” Since RNA-based vaccines and new drugs cannot be synthesized directly, the existing process requires synthesizing DNA and then transcribing it into RNA.
DNA synthesis, which is prone to errors, inevitably involved culturing Escherichia coli over a long period and extracting DNA, resulting in high production costs and low production efficiency.
By applying the high-purity nucleic acid purification technology developed by Professor Kwon’s team, it is possible to reduce production costs and shorten time by omitting the E. coli culturing process, ultimately maximizing the production volume of RNA vaccines and therapeutics.
Nucleic acids, a concept that includes DNA and RNA, are molecules involved in life phenomena such as genetics and protein synthesis and play a key role in the body. Nucleic acid-based COVID-19 vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna have been commercialized, attracting attention worldwide. Pfizer and Moderna have raised the prices of COVID-19 vaccines supplied to the European Union (EU).
Noting that insertion and deletion phenomena are major causes of errors in nucleic acid automatic synthesizers, the team applied a method to measure the length of synthesized nucleic acids and select only those of the intended length.
For measuring nucleic acid length, they utilized sequencing equipment from Illumina, a U.S. company widely installed in major laboratories, and automated the purification process through this equipment, which is expected to enable rapid application in academia and industry.
Professor Seonghoon Kwon of the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Seoul National University, said, “Through the development of nucleic acid purification technology, it will be possible to activate basic research using nucleic acids and related research on nucleic acid-based vaccines and therapeutics.” The research was supported by the Basic Research Project (Leader Research) of the Ministry of Science and ICT and was published in the world-renowned journal Nature Biotechnology.
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