On May 27, 2019, ST Pharm (President Kim Kyung-jin) announced that it had attended the ‘2019 TIDES: Oligonucleotide and Peptide Therapeutics’ conference held in Boston, USA for 4 days from May 20.
The TIDES is an international society that shares the latest developments in oligonucleotide and peptide-based drug development. This year, more than 1,000 researchers and company executives from around the world attended the event, presenting more than 125 case studies and clinical results.
Jeon Gyeong-eun, the executive director of ST Pharm's research division, introduced ST Pharm’s competitiveness in producing oligonucleotide drug substances by giving a presentation titled ‘A Comparison of Purification Strategies in Oligonucleotide API Manufacturing: Chromatography and Desalting Processes’ t the conference.
In addition, the company held partnering meetings with twenty-six companies - including GSK, Janssen, Alnylam, Ionis, MDCO, and Arrowhead ？ that are currently developing oligonucleotide therapeutics in order to introduce the production capacity and raw material orders of ST Pharm’s new factory dedicated to oligonucleotide drug substances.
ST Pharm’s built its new factory, which can produce up to 750kg of oligonucleotides per year, in June of last year. Since its completion, visits and audits from global pharmaceutical companies and biotech have been increasing steadily.
Oligonucleotide therapeutics bind directly to DNA or RNA with genetic information in vivo while blocking pathological genetic information, thereby exhibiting more fundamental therapeutic effects. As the global market for therapeutics is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 43.5% from 1 trillion KRW in 2017 to 18 trillion KRW by 2024, the drug substance market is expected to expand significantly as well.
An executive of ST Pharm said, “The development of oligonucleotide therapeutics is expanding from rare drugs and refractory genetic diseases to chronic diseases, anticancer drugs, and neurological diseases. ST Pharm will seek to further expand its orders based on its outstanding drug substance production technology and its huge production volume, which ranks No. 1 in Asia and No. 3 in the world.”
Meanwhile, ST Pharm recently won three new drug projects worth 26 billion KRW from two global pharmaceutical companies and started full production in April. Since the company currently supplies clinical oligonucleotide drug substances for more than twenty new drug products, when new drugs are released in the future, sales are expected to increase by covering their commercial volume.