In the last few years, biotech companies in Korea have targeted innovation in drug development and are building platforms to develop new drugs. Many biotechnology researchers and entrepreneurs came together to develop new drugs and are working to take them to the commercialization stage.

The team that started LegoChem Biosciences in 2006 had something similar in mind. Prof Yong-Zu Kim, CEO; Tae Kyo Park, CTO and senior vice president; Sung Ho Woo, biology director and vice-president; and Sejin Park, CFO and VP, set up the company with the objective to accelerate discovery and development of new small molecule drugs.

Having a lot of research experience in the field of new drug R&D, they decided to give it the shape of entrepreneurship. The idea was to enable discovery of new small molecule drugs faster and more efficiently by combining their core technology, LegoChemistry, with early absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity (ADMET) screening platform technologies.

LegoChem Biosciences is committed to building sustainable pipelines in therapeutic areas of antibiotics, anti-coagulants, anti-cancer and antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) platform technology.

Currently, it has 12 projects and the leading ones among them are second generation oxazolidinone antibiotics, anti-coagulants FXa inhibitor and next generation ADC platform technology.