JW Pharmaceutical announced today that it has signed a business agreement with Merck Life Science (Merck) of Germany at its headquarters in Seocho-dong, Seoul for research and development of raw materials for new drugs using AI.
Under the agreement, Merck will provide Merck's AI software 'Synthia™' to JW Pharmaceutical.
Synthia is a program that quickly analyzes and provides the synthesis route of drug substances in the new drug development stage. In addition, Merck's Custom Synthesis Lab's new material synthesis know-how is consulted to JW Pharmaceutical.
JW Pharmaceutical's raw material research center plans to actively utilize Synthia for its own synthesis research of new drug candidates. As a result, it is expected to reduce research time and cost for compound manufacturing methods to be used in non-clinical and clinical trials.
Along with this, the company plans to build an unmanned automated laboratory environment in which robots synthesize raw materials 24 hours a day on behalf of researchers.
“Synthia derives solutions with more than 100,000 rules and sophisticated algorithms, and can be used for new drug development, patent application, and thesis," said Lee Nam-gu, CEO of Merck Science & Labs Solution Business. "As Korean biopharmaceutical companies, including JW Pharmaceutical, are actively strengthening their new drug pipelines using AI, we expect Merck's world-class technology to contribute to open innovation in the industry.”
“JW Pharmaceutical is carrying out various open innovation activities with bio companies with innovative AI technology to strengthen the new drug pipeline discovered through its own R&D platform," said Shin Young-seop, CEO of JW Pharmaceutical. "This cooperation in automated synthesis research with Merck will be the cornerstone to efficiently carry out JW's various new drug research going forward.”
