On November 19, ST Pharm (President Kim Kyung-jin) announced that the company had attended the ‘TIDES: Oligonucleotide and Peptide Therapeutics 2019’ meeting held for 4 days from November 12th.
TIDES is an international society that shares the latest developments in oligonucleotide and peptide-based drug development. During the latest TIDES meeting, ST Pharm’s presentation focused on the excellence of the Banwol oligo factory which was completed in 2018.
The new Banwol oligo factory is the first stand-alone factory to be built according to the pharmaceutical concept rather than the bio concept. Notably, it is equipped with the world’s first and only oligo-monomer simultaneous continuous production system, which can guarantee differentiated price competitiveness, supply continuity, and quality stability compared to competitors’ systems. It can also shorten the new drug development period of a client by minimizing the delivery time.
The company’s oligonucleotides production capacity now amounts to around 800kg annually - the world’s second-largest production capacity after the 1400kg of Nitto Denko Avecia ？ due to the recent expansion of its production and purification lines.
During the meeting, ST Pharm held a partnership meeting on the supply of oligonucleotides with leading global pharmaceutical companies including Janssen, Roche, Novartis, GSK, and Bayer, and biotech companies such as Ionis and Alnylam. The company also signed an agreement with a US biotech company to supply oligonucleotide raw materials worth KRW 13.4 billion for the phase III clinical study. The company plans to continue discussions on the supply of commercialized raw materials in the future.
Evaluate Pharma, a global research firm, predicts that the market for DNA and RNA-based oligonucleotide therapeutics will grow by 139.3% per year from 2016 to 2024, the fastest rising growth among the next generation of therapeutics. Furthermore, the area is expected to expand from rare diseases to chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and hepatitis B, and the demand for oligonucleotide raw materials is expected to increase rapidly.
An executive of ST Pharm said, “Global pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies in the US and Europe, which are currently supplying clinical raw materials, have more than 20 oligonucleotide new drug pipelines, three of which are currently undergoing phase III clinical studies.” “As the number of new drug pipelines based on oligonucleotides increases in the future, along with the commercialization of these pipelines, ST Pharm expects to receive more orders of raw materials,” he added.