S.Korean Proteina gets offers from global pharmaceutical companies

Global pharmaceutical companies are expressing keen interest in the South Korean diagnostics company Proteina. Unlike companies that search for specific proteins, Proteina has developed a technology to forecast the effects of medicine by analyzing interactions that occur when proteins bind together.

Proteina CEO Yoon Tae-young on Sunday told reporters, "Next month, a global pharmaceutical company based in Chicago is pursuing a contract (with us) to jointly conduct Phase 1 clinical trials for blood cancer."

If concluded, the Korean company will be the world's first to conduct clinical trials on humans with a global pharmaceutical company based on protein-protein interaction (PPI) technology. Earlier in August, Proteina is known to have received contact from other global pharmaceutical companies to jointly develop substances from the animal testing stage.

A life sciences professor at Seoul National University, Yoon founded Proteina in 2015 while a professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, aka KAIST. The basis for his company's launch came in 2014, when he received support from Samsung Electronics Co. for a project to develop next-generation technology.

As a basic building block of the human body, protein is useful in the development of new drugs. Cancer occurs when certain proteins fail to properly function or if the body has too many of them, so most medicines for fighting the disease either help these proteins do their jobs or prevent the large-scale production of certain types.

Many drugmakers have developed medicine that control the functions of one or two types of proteins. Proteina, however, went beyond this by focusing on the interactions of proteins that recognize and bind to each other to assess the potential for producing proteins C or D by quantitatively measuring interactions between proteins A and B instead of merely observing their presence or absence.

An estimated 650,000 PPI in the human body are involved in cell composition, meaning a wide of candidate proteins could be used in the development of drugs and diagnostic agents.

To use PPI for diagnosis, the target proteins must be well extracted with no damage. CEO Yoon, an expert in the field who has studied membrane proteins for almost 10 years, used membrane protein technology formed by cell membranes. Such proteins are effective in detecting PPI because of their role in accepting external substances or conveying signals.

"Olink of Sweden and Quanterix of the US are competitors that measure PPI, but Proteina is the world's only company to apply it to clinical sample analysis," he said. "Next year, we will unveil a solution for evaluating medicinal effects." 

Write to Jeong Min Nam at peux@hankyung.com