The Ministry of Science and Technology announced that it plans to earmark 50 billion won (US$54.4 million) for animal and clinical testing of new drugs in 2008, raising it from 31.1 billion won (US$33.8 million) last year. Vice Science Minister Park Jong-koo stated: e were spending about 400 million won [US$435,000] to test each new substance that had the potential to be used as a drug. We are looking to increase the investment-per-substance amount from one to two billion won. We expect to spend about 50 billion won as a necessary budget.
Through the increased backing, Vice Minister Park predicted that a new drug will be developed every year from 2016, which will earn the nation more than one trillion won (US$1.09 billion) every year. He added: n addition, we aim to put more efforts to find new building blocks of brand-new medicines. With such an initiative, we hope biotechnology will become the next-generation growth engine for our economy.
Domestic companies so far have struggled to create new drugs due to a lack of funds and the top-notch researchers. Instead of working on new medicines, most Korean companies paid attention to work on generic drugs, the bio-equivalent of the original ones. While the US companies were coming up with dozens of new ones annually, local pharmaceutical firms created many less than the number.
Regarding to the FTA agreementsstronger enforcement of intellectual property rights, the government will try to draft a set of measures to bring a paradigm shift to the local pharmaceutical industry from duplicators of generic drugs to new medicine creators.