Institut Pasteur Korea and the Innovative Center for Bio-Imaging Guided Drug Discovery and Development of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital have signed a Memorandum of Understanding covering various scientific collaborations with an aim to establish bio imaging based drug discovery pipelines.

Combining proprietary assets and know-how in bio imaging and drug discovery, both organization will collaborate in expert training, researcher exchange and education programs as well as efficacy and safety studies of novel drug candidates.

Bio imaging is a revolutionary technology enabling researchers to visualize and quantify complex biological events in living cells or molecular level and it has been recognized as an influential technology to replace the existing techniques in drug discovery. Furthermore, bio imaging technology combined with analysis techniques on the big data generated from pre-clinical and clinical trials are expected to increase the efficiency of drug discovery research with significance.

For a decade, the interdisciplinary research team of Institut Pasteur Korea including biologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians have pioneered in bio imaging technologies. Integrating its bio imaging technology and high throughput screening, Institut Pasteur Korea developed an innovative drug discovery platform that can screen highly infectious pathogens, such as tuberculosis (TB) and hepatitis and influenza viruses, in BSL-2 and 3 environments; resulting in discovery of a new best-in-class molecule to fight drug resistant TB as well as progresses made in inflammation and hepatitis research. Currently, a patent on its computational method to acquire and process bio images is issued in five countries including US, Japan, China and Hong Kong.

With the motto of “drug discovery research gets faster with visualization”, the Innovative Center for Bio-Imaging Guided Drug Discovery and Development, located in Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, supports domestic pharmaceutical and bio venture companies with bio imaging guided drug discovery research. It is focused on improving and accelerating the entire drug discovery research phases by utilizing its bio imaging technologies as well as on developing related policies and training experts. The Innovative Center for Bio-Imaging Guided Drug Discovery and Development has been employing the pharmacokinetic evaluation technique for living organs that utilizes radioisotope and bio imaging to analyze dose-activity relationship supported by the in-vivo pharmacodynamics evaluation technique that uses imaging bio marker or surrogate marker to identify drug efficacy in cell or molecular levels. These technologies are expected to bridge the technology gap with global pharmaceutical industry and to improve efficiency of domestic drug discovery. To maximize the bio imaging based drug discovery capabilities, the Innovative Center for Bio-Imaging Guided Drug Discovery and Development has built open networks with 6 bio-imaging centers, 2 contract research organizations and 10 domestic pharmaceutical and bio venter companies.

Dr. Hakim Djaballah, CEO of Institut Pasteur Korea, said, “Leveraging bio imaging technology, we can expect higher possibility to succeed in drug discovery at reduced cost and time because it provides opportunities to study on efficacy and toxicity of new molecules in live cells more reliably from the early stage of drug discovery research,” and he added, “The synergy created from collaborations with the Innovative Center for Bio-Imaging Guided Drug Discovery and Development of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital will lead to new field applicable bio imaging technologies and further help Korea to sharpen its drug discovery capabilities.”

Dr. Sangeun Kim, Director of the Innovative Center for Bio-Imaging Guided Drug Discovery and Development of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, said, “Drug discovery is one of the typical high value-added industries, for which the large cost and time required becomes an obstacle.” and added, “Throughout the collaboration with Institut Pasteur Korea, we will do our best to contribute in the drug discovery industry by utilizing the global-standard bio imaging technology of Korea.”