"Korea Eisai aims to build a healthcare ecosystem that raises the value of patients' experiences beyond developing and supplying treatments through open innovation."
Kim Eun-ho, director of healthcare ecosystem design innovation at Korea Eisai (hereinafter, director), met with ChosunBiz on the 3rd and discussed Korea Eisai's open innovation strategy.
Korea Eisai is the Korean subsidiary of the Japanese global pharmaceutical company Eisai and was established in Korea in 1997. Leqembi, a new drug that slows the progression of dementia by removing amyloid beta, a protein that causes Alzheimer's disease, is one of Eisai's key medicines.
Kim oversees open innovation and R&D collaboration at Korea Eisai. Kim said the main roles are "external technology scouting and proof of concept (PoC), and evaluating commercial viability."
Korea Eisai has identified and carried out various collaborations with domestic startups and small and mid-sized companies developing Digital Healthcare solutions related to dementia prevention, diagnosis and management.
NeuroXti, which developed software that analyzes biomarkers via MRI to diagnose Alzheimer's disease and determine drug suitability; Emocog, which developed Korea's first digital therapeutic for mild cognitive impairment (MCI); and Kriple, which developed cognitive ability enhancement training services, are among the domestic startups Korea Eisai has discovered and collaborated with.
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Kim said Korea Eisai's open innovation focuses on providing value to patients across the entire cycle, not only in treatment but also in prevention, diagnosis and rehabilitation.
Kim said, "The healthcare industry has recently been shifting rapidly from treatment-centered to patient experience-centered," and added, "In particular, the pace of innovation is accelerating with advances in digital health, AI and data-driven technologies, and the Korean market, in particular, has a high pace of technology adoption and execution capability, making strategic collaboration increasingly important."
Korea Eisai has also participated in several collaboration programs led by government ministries and local governments. One of them is the public-private partnership open innovation support program overseen by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and organized by the Seoul Center for Creative Economy & Innovation.
The program is a win-win cooperation initiative that matches collaboration needs between large companies and startups and supports follow-up connections to activate open innovation.
Kim said, "From the perspective of discovering patient-centered innovative technologies by expanding technology verification and proof with startups and small and mid-sized companies, the purpose of the program aligned with Korea Eisai's open innovation strategy, and when public support combines with the capabilities of corporations, we can conduct faster and more structured technology verification, so we participated in the program."
Kim said Korea Eisai has three main criteria when selecting cooperation partners: Does it contribute to improving "patient value"? Are the clinical and technical rationales clear? And is a mutually complementary and sustainable collaboration structure feasible in the mid to long term?
Kim said proposals that approach the question of "What problem can Korea Eisai and the startup solve together?" are given higher priority for collaboration.
Kim added, "It is important to have clear goals, metrics and success criteria," and said, "Startups seeking collaboration must at least have clinical evidence and a data quality system in place."
Kim suggested that for domestic startups and small and mid-sized companies in the pharmaceutical and bio fields to grow, public proof-of-concept infrastructure for early technology verification needs to be strengthened. Kim said policy incentives that enable long-term partnerships between large companies and small and mid-sized companies, and national, full-cycle support programs that connect technology development, proof and commercialization, need to back this.
Korea Eisai plans to strengthen its role as a strategic partner that grows alongside domestic startups.
Kim said, "Going forward, we plan to expand mid- to long-term PoCs in digital health and AI and strengthen a co-creation model that designs common goals with startups," adding, "In the mid to long term, we will build a strategic collaboration roadmap to grow together with Korean startups and small and mid-sized companies."