The expanded life expectancy of modern days radically increases probabilities of getting chronic diseases such as cancer, dementia, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. Due to poor investment in R&D, however, new drug discovery has been torpid during the last decade and in 2010 only 21 new drugs were approved by the FDA in the US.
Medicinal Bioconvergence Research Center (Biocon, Director Sunghoon Kim) has been born to solve the increasing difficulties in new drug discovery. Since Biocon foresees that securing novel therapeutic targets and biomarkers that can accurately indicate various human diseases is the biggest bottleneck in drug discovery, it will mainly focus on novel therapeutic target discovery and validation that can be further explored by the industry.
While focusing on the pathological network mediated by ARSs, Biocon will further expand its interest to other targets. For rapid expansion of target discovery and validation, Biocon will integrate diverse cutting-edge technologies not only from bioscience area such as bioinformatics, genomics, proteomics, cellomics and animal models, but also from other area such as chemical-, nano-, microfluidicand biochip-technologies.
Using these research contents and innovative technologies, Biocon aims to become "The World Best Target Factory" that fills the upstream value chain for the global drug discovery community.
