[Interview] Gallux CEO Seok Chaok: "AI Drug Development Will Achieve Blockbuster Results"

"Creating Antibodies Never Seen Before"
"Goal: To Become the 'Novo Nordisk' of Korea"
"Possibility of Conquering All Diseases Within 30 Years"

"Our goal is to become the Novo Nordisk of Korea. We want to bring a new wave to the Korean pharmaceutical industry by achieving blockbuster-level results like Wegovy."

Seok Chaok, CEO of the AI drug discovery startup Gallux and professor at the Department of Chemistry at Seoul National University, shared this ambition in an interview with Asia Economy on May 9. Novo Nordisk is a Danish pharmaceutical company that developed the obesity drug Wegovy and rose to become the top company in Europe by market capitalization.

Seok Chaok, CEO of Gallux. Photo by Jo Yongjun

Gallux succeeded in de novo antibody design in December last year. De novo antibody design is an AI-based protein structure prediction and design technology. As of now, only three companies worldwide, including Gallux, have achieved success in de novo antibody design.

Gallux originated from Professor Seok's research lab at Seoul National University. Building on its solid technological foundation, the company is jointly developing new drugs through strategic collaborations with pharmaceutical companies such as LG Chem and Y-Biologics.

Born in 1970, Seok graduated from the Department of Chemistry at Seoul National University and earned his master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Chicago in the United States. After serving as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, he was appointed as a professor at Seoul National University's Department of Chemistry in 2004. His research focuses on protein structure and interaction prediction technologies. Since around 2010, his lab has consistently ranked among the top in global protein structure prediction competitions such as CASP and CAPRI, building an international reputation for over a decade.

Seok recalled that John Jumper, principal researcher at Google DeepMind, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year, and mentioned his connection with him, expressing his belief that advances in AI will be a major turning point for the entire industry.

When Seok was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, Jumper was the youngest graduate student in the same lab. In 2018, Jumper developed the AI model AlphaFold at DeepMind, which made it possible to predict the structures of 200 million proteins discovered to date. As they came from the same lab, Seok and Jumper share a similar research background.

Seok said, "The advancement and application of AI is an extremely important and revolutionary event that will change the landscape going forward," and added, "It is similar to how the birth of quantum mechanics brought about a major transformation in the scientific community."

He further noted, "The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is attempting to replace animal testing in the drug development process with AI," and predicted, "Since the FDA is an important institution that sets industry standards, this will bring significant changes to the pharmaceutical industry as well."

The prevailing view in the industry is that as AI-based drug development becomes full-scale, the possibility of conquering human diseases is beginning to emerge. He said, "Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, has said that within 10 years, AI will be able to create antibodies for any disease we want," and added, "While some in academia think 10 years may be too soon, many believe it will be possible within 20 to 30 years."

He devoted himself solely to research until he founded Gallux in 2020. The motivation behind this move was his desire for his research achievements to provide real-world help to more people. Seok said, "Even before founding the company, I had been researching protein structure and interaction prediction technologies for over 25 years," and added, "The hope that world-class achievements would not remain only as academic accomplishments but be applied in the real world to save more lives led me to start the company."

AI plays a role in dramatically reducing both development time and costs, and increasing the success rate throughout the entire process of drug development, from target identification and early compound discovery to preclinical and clinical stages. One of the most notable technologies in the field of antibody therapeutics is Gallux's de novo antibody design technology.

This technology predicts the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence and enables the design of proteins with specific functions 'from scratch.' It is a technology for designing new antibodies that have never existed before. This allows for the rapid design of precision therapeutics targeting specific diseases, fundamentally changing the landscape of drug development.

Before the development of de novo antibody design technology, it was necessary to first discover the required proteins through screening (the process of identifying candidate substances), and then go through a complex and diverse series of validation steps to develop them into drugs. This meant that countless proteins had to be checked directly and randomly.

Seok is now looking toward the next stage of AI-based antibody design. He is working on technology that goes beyond the one-to-one structure, where one antibody molecule targets one target molecule, to enable a single antibody molecule to bind to multiple target molecules.

He explained, "Finding antibody molecules that can bind to multiple target molecules is extremely unlikely in nature," and added, "It is similar to how the intersection of three circles is much smaller than the size of each individual circle."