LG CNS recently signed a contract for a new drug development project led by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and began expanding its artificial intelligence transformation (AX) business in the pharmaceutical and bio sectors by building Chong Kun Dang pharmaceutical's automated product quality evaluation system.
LG CNS said on the 21st that it will participate as a service agency in the "K-AI preclinical and clinical model development project (R&D)" promoted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Over the next 4 years and 3 months, about 37.1 billion won in government support will be invested in this large-scale national research project.
In this project, LG CNS will lead the development of an "artificial intelligence (AI)-based clinical trial design and support platform for new drug development." It will also implement an integrated management system that connects various AI models for new drug development being developed by other participating institutions on an agentic AI basis.
In particular, it will apply "federated learning" technology so that multiple institutions, such as medical institutions and clinical research centers, can jointly train AI models securely while maintaining security without sharing data externally. Through this, the plan is to safely use medical data, where security is critical, and link the previously siloed preclinical and clinical stages to increase the speed and success rate of new drug development.
According to the industry, new drug development typically takes 10 to 15 years and requires massive expense, and the failure rate in the clinical trial stage reaches 90%. A fragmented clinical trial structure across institutions and limited data utilization have been cited as structural limitations in the new drug development field.
A company official said, "We will raise the success rate of new drug development by using a bio AI platform that combines LG CNS' specialized capabilities tailored to the pharmaceutical and bio industries, such as protein structure analysis and design, with the latest AI technologies."
LG CNS also recently completed work to automate Chong Kun Dang pharmaceutical's annual product quality review report (hereafter APQR) preparation using agentic AI. Chong Kun Dang pharmaceutical said that after introducing the "agentic AI-based APQR automation service" built by LG CNS, it cut the generation time per document by more than 90%.
Kim Tae-hoon, head of LG CNS AI Cloud Business Unit (executive vice president), said, "By leading agentic AI technology, we will enhance the competitiveness of Korea's pharmaceutical and bio industries and become a game changer that provides differentiated customer value."