South Korea's Turn: CDMO Powerhouse Adds Biotech Innovation

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

Much has been written about China’s biotech-innovation growth.

My explanation among others: Where CDMOs flourish, biotech innovation follows.

Another example is South Korea, where the latest indications of which arrived in March:

Lilly signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the South Korean government indicating the U.S. pharma giant will invest $500 million in the clinical trial ecosystem and biopharma industry in that country.

About a week later, Roche announced it was investing $480 million in South Korea, likewise to help establish clinical trials and bolster research and development.

It is not coincidence one of the world’s impactful CDMOs (Samsung Biologics) resides there, along with other providers such as Celltrion and SK Bioscience.

For decades, China was all contract development and manufacturing … until it wasn’t. Today it’s a verifiable biotech power player.

Now South Korea appears well on its way. 

While contract manufacturing was the first wave of our industry to hit that country, South Korea consistently ranks among the top 10 globally in number of clinical trials conducted, and is widely regarded as a most efficient region in Asia for patient recruitment and trial execution.

Both the plant and the clinic have helped create a new biotech innovation center.

Outsourcing Creates Biotech

There are other contributing factors – education systems (with a STEM focus); modern infrastructure (electricity, water, roads/ airports); overall culture for business; investability; government largesse and focus; and healthcare systems and structure.

Yet the influence of established CDMOs (and CROs) on the biotech-innovator side  is undeniable.

Frankly, we witness this in parts of the U.S. as well. For example, a component of the success of the (still growing) biopharma cluster in North Carolina has been its early and continuous establishment and investments in CDMOs there.

Back to South Korea and the Lilly announcement, the country will now be added to the Lilly Gateway Labs network for “biopharma innovation.”

That new Gateway Lab – described as an incubator to begin with – will be built in collaboration with South Korean contract manufacturing giant Samsung Biologics, and is set to house up to 30 companies, according to a release from Samsung.

Speaking of Samsung Biologics, on this side of the Pacific – and also in March – the CDMO completed its acquisition of GSK’s manufacturing facility in Rockville, Maryland.

According to the company, this adds 60,000 liters of drug substance capacity, bringing the CDMOs total capacity to 845,000 liters, and denotes a geographical diversification with this first U.S. manufacturing presence.

Additionally, Samsung Biologics and Kurma Partners, a European venture capital firm in healthcare/biotechnology, formed a strategic partnership to develop and manufacture biologics for Kurma's portfolio companies.

That multi-year collaboration is expected to support sustainable growth of the biopharmaceutical industry, and allow Samsung Biologics to expand its footprint into the European market.

National Innovation, Deal By Deal

South Korean is experiencing the transition that China underwent over the past decade. It starts in the main with the growth of a domestic CDMO presence, which then expands internationally. 

According to government and industry estimates, South Korea now hosts more than 2,000 biotech and pharmaceutical companies, with a growing concentration in the Songdo and Seoul corridors.

With shades of China’s industrial policy, the Korea Ministry of Health and Welfare has set an explicit goal of becoming a top-five global biopharma nation by 2030, backed by multi-billion-dollar public and private investment programs.

Some of that is already in the making:

• Alteogen has developed proprietary antibody engineering technologies and signed global licensing deals with major pharmaceutical companies.
• LegoChem Biosciences has become a notable player in antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), partnering with global pharma on next-generation oncology therapies.
• ABL Bio is advancing bispecific antibody platforms, including collaborations with multinational partners.

These are not early academic experiments, but globally partnered, clinically advancing biotech companies – the kind of ecosystem output that tends to follow the establishment of CDMO infrastructure.

It won’t be long before that CDMO-enabled infrastructure, and further clinical investment from companies like Lilly and Roche, further ignites a domestic biotech sector already stepping onto the global stage.

Lilly has in fact previously sought biotech innovation from South Korea, working with RNA-editing company Rznomics to co-develop a hearing loss therapy, in a deal that reportedly could reach $1.3 billion in value.

Other biopharma organizations have also turned to the nation for novel candidates.

Vertex Pharmaceuticals did a deal with Orum in 2024 to help with new gene-editing therapies; GSK took on a brain-penetrating platform from ABL Bio; Boehringer Ingelheim licensed an antibody-drug conjugate from AimedBio.

Boehringer, for example, sees South Korea as a “strategic innovation hub” in Asia, and is currently running 50 global trials spanning all stages of development.

In 2024, Boehringer established a Korean Business Development and Licensing function to “deepen open innovation partnerships with Korean biotech companies."

CDMOs, clinical trials, biotech innovators, pharma partnerships, global investors. South Korea has the formula. 

Who’s next?