Celltrion, Open Innovation with Bio Startups through 'Startup Park'

Incheon Songdo Celltrion Plant 2 Overview. / Incheon - Photo by Hyunmin Kim kimhyun81@

[Asia Economy Reporter Chunhee Lee] Celltrion continues to collaborate through open innovation with promising bio startups.

According to Celltrion on the 8th, the company has been participating in the Incheon Startup Park project since 2020. The project is overseen by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and organized by Incheon City and the Incheon Free Economic Zone Authority. It aims to discover and nurture startups in the fields of 4th Industrial Revolution technologies and bio convergence.

Since 2020, Celltrion has formed a consortium with Shinhan Financial Group to jointly operate the private-led program ‘Shinhan Square Bridge Incheon.’ Especially in the bio and healthcare sectors, Celltrion runs open innovation programs to discover and nurture startups in areas such as ▲innovative new drugs ▲bio materials and components ▲digital healthcare, focusing efforts on building a bio valley in Songdo.

After joining the project, Celltrion has promoted or reviewed more than 50 open innovation projects based on its own technologies and business needs. In the innovative new drug sector, it is collaborating with Pinobio, which develops an antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) platform. Celltrion directly discovered Pinobio and linked it to the Startup Park project, supporting animal efficacy verification of the ADC linker-payload platform technology. In October, Celltrion signed a contract with Pinobio for the introduction of an option to use the ADC linker-payload platform technology, equity investment, and joint research, officially embarking on ADC new drug development.

In the bio materials and components sector, Celltrion supported Umtle, a startup developing and manufacturing membrane filters, with a two-year mentoring program and product demonstration tests using Celltrion’s development infrastructure and facilities as a test bed. Based on this, Umtle improved its self-developed membrane filter to global corporate-level performance and achieved follow-up investment attraction through the incubation membership of ‘Shinhan Square Bridge Incheon.’ Going forward, Celltrion plans to review contracts for supplying Umtle’s bottle-top filters through product suitability evaluation.

Additionally, Celltrion is promoting various open innovation initiatives in digital healthcare fields such as digital therapeutics (DTx) and artificial intelligence (AI), including joint commercialization, investment, and cooperation proposal reviews.

A Celltrion official said, “We continuously seek opportunities to discover excellent domestic bio startups and create synergy through collaboration. Through the Incheon Startup Park project, we aim to realize the values of mutual growth and win-win cooperation and do our best as an anchor company to help Korea’s bio industry leap forward globally.”