The Korea Drug Development Fund (KDDF) has selected 10 outstanding examples of new drug development over the past three years, including those carried out by Daewoong Pharmaceutical and CellBion.

On Tuesday, the KDDF held the “Presentation of Outstanding National New Drug Development Projects for 2023” at the Seoul Dragon City Hotel.

Officials at the state fund explained that they organized the event to recognize the excellence of major projects that have been carried out since 2021.

KDDF formed a selection committee composed of internal and external members to conduct a step-by-step evaluation and selected outstanding projects in the following categories -- High Performance, Technology Breakthrough, and New Insight.

The panel selected 10 companies and institutions through the process.

The finalists are AbTis, Daewoong Pharmaceutical, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), PimedBio, Genome & Company, Curocell, CellBion, IMBiologics, FutureChem, and SNU R&DB Foundation. Daewoong Pharmaceutical, Genome & Company, and CellBion presented their results at the event.

The fund also unveiled a new project, “Support for Excellent New Drug Development to Promote Global Advance and Partnering,” for 2024.

The program will support global collaborative clinical development of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), targeted proteolytic/molecular glue (TPD/Molecular Glue), cellular gene therapy (CGT), and novel target/new modality.

In the case of clinical-stage substances, support is available when global collaborative research is underway, where global collaboration refers to global joint clinical development by domestic R&D organizations with overseas collaborators.

Collaborators include global pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, Roche, and MSD; large NASDAQ-listed biotech firms like Regeneron and Biogen; and global clinical trial-capable organizations like the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

"The new drug development project, for which we collected and selected targets times a year, will be collected twice a year from next year," said Kim Soon-nam, head of the R&D Headquarters at KDDF. "The ADCaptain Project, which supports ADC pipeline development, will continue next year."