Government Support Includes GPU Resources Worth 18.2 Billion Won
Medical artificial intelligence (AI) company Lunit announced on October 31 that it has been selected as the lead institution in the medical science field for the national strategic project, the "AI Specialized Foundation Model Project," promoted by the Ministry of Science and ICT.
This project is part of the government's initiative to build a large-scale AI ecosystem. The task led by Lunit is titled "Development of a Multiscale Medical Science Specialized Foundation Model for Full-Cycle Medical Science Innovation from Molecules to Populations."
The goal of this initiative is to develop a foundation model that internalizes evidence-based knowledge spanning molecules, proteins, omics, pharmaceuticals, medical science papers and guidelines, and clinical knowledge. Based on this, the project aims to establish six applied agentic systems. Ultimately, the objective is to increase the clinical success rate at every stage, including clinical decision-making, clinical research, and new drug development.
The Lunit consortium comprises seven companies-Trillion Labs, IGenScience, SK Biopharmaceuticals, Kakao Healthcare, Standigm, Rebellion, and Dcircle-along with six faculty research teams from KAIST and Seoul National University, and nine medical institutions including the National Health Insurance Service Ilsan Hospital, Yongin Severance Hospital, and Kyung Hee University Medical Center. In total, 23 organizations from industry, academia, research, and medical sectors have established a collaborative framework.
Through this selection, the Lunit consortium will execute a project valued at a total of 18.21073 billion won. Of this, approximately 17.4 billion won worth of GPU infrastructure resources will be provided by the government, and research and development will be carried out in two phases until September 2026. The plan is to leverage this large-scale, short-term GPU support to secure technology that can be commercialized immediately upon project completion.
Until now, the knowledge systems at each stage in the medical science field have been disconnected. Although specialized AI models existed for each stage, there was no integrated agent system to comprehensively utilize them, making it difficult to establish a chain of evidence that leads research to the ultimate goal of clinical success. As the lead and technical supervising institution for this project, Lunit has spearheaded the formation of the consortium and set the direction for technology development from the early stages.
Lunit plans to ▲ lead the development of a medical science specialized foundation model with 32 billion parameters, ▲ release this model, which integrates full-cycle knowledge data from molecules to clinics, as a commercial open source, and ▲ expand it into various applied services by building agentic systems based on it. Specifically, Lunit intends to expand this model into six applied services, including a Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS), an intelligent biomedical research partner AI (BMCS), and a nationwide health management chatbot. After development is complete, Lunit will conduct demonstrations at a total of 13 domestic institutions (11 hospitals and 2 pharmaceutical organizations), begin by expanding distribution to tertiary general hospitals and pharmaceutical companies nationwide, and ultimately promote the global expansion of Korean medical AI.
Seo Bumseok, CEO of Lunit, stated, "As the lead institution for this project, Lunit has taken the initiative in preparing for the business and will continue to lead the consortium to achieve innovative results. Through this project, we will leverage the accumulated full-cycle AI technology and global network to continuously expand our business beyond Korea, while also realizing medical innovation that the public can truly experience."
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