BioFDNC Selected for Incheon City-ITP New Growth Engine R&D Support Project

BioFDNC, a leading domestic plant cell platform company, and Incheon Technopark (ITP), an innovation platform for small and medium-sized enterprises in Incheon, announced on the 27th that they signed an agreement for the 'New Growth Engine R&D Support Project.'

Accordingly, BioFDNC will carry out the 'Synthetic Biology-Based Plant Cell Culture/Production Biofoundry System Construction Design Support Project' with the goal of global technology transfer related to plant cell culture technology by March next year.

The plant cell biofoundry is a biotechnology that integrates advanced technologies such as robotics and AI based on synthetic biology. In other words, it is a project that significantly improves the speed, scale, and production efficiency of bio-manufacturing processes by using advanced technologies to overcome the limitations of synthetic biology, which had low productivity and high uncertainty.

Above all, amid serious issues such as food production crises caused by climate change and environmental damage caused by excessive R&D, synthetic biology-based plant cell biofoundries are gaining attention as technologies that can obtain useful foods and medicines for humans without harming nature.

Last year, the Biden administration in the United States classified biofoundries as a future core industry and signed an executive order to support R&D funding worth 2.4 trillion won. Biofoundries are defined as advanced bio-technologies that integrate IT-BT technologies and implement complex processes from DNA assembly to cell improvement through rapid iterative processes.

By combining synthetic biology with advanced technologies (big data, AI, automated robots, etc.), the limitations of synthetic biology such as uncertainty and low productivity are overcome, enabling improvements in the speed, scale, and production efficiency of bio-manufacturing processes. Global advanced bio countries are competing to establish such systems.

The Korean government is also actively supporting this. Bio-materials such as specific proteins are produced based on synthetic biology using gene editing technology with animal cells or bacteria. However, research and development of systems producing using plant cells is still insufficient.

It is explained that utilizing plant cell systems is much more economical in terms of cost. Current medicines developed with animal cell-based proteins face profitability issues due to virus infections during production and high culture medium costs, and there are problems with therapeutic proteins that do not express in animal cells. However, using plant cell production systems can greatly reduce infection risks as well as the cost of culture media. Above all, it enables much easier mass production compared to animal cells.

In short, plant cell biofoundry technology is an eco-friendly technology that can mass-produce protein cells that are more beneficial to humans while minimizing side effects. Proteins mass-produced in biofoundries can commercialize medicines or foods faster and more safely.

The global bio-pharmaceutical market size rapidly grew from $284 billion (380 trillion won) in 2020 to $344 billion (460 trillion won) in 2022. The proportion of plant-derived bio-pharmaceuticals in the bio-pharmaceutical market is expected to increase sharply in the future, benefiting plant cell platform and biofoundry companies including BioFDNC.

Lee Jung-hoon, Vice President of BioFDNC, said, “To join the ranks of advanced bio countries, we must dominate the plant cell biofoundry sector,” and added, “Just as Taiwan’s TSMC is the largest semiconductor foundry, we will strive to make BioFDNC the world’s leading plant cell biofoundry.”