"The reason Luxembourg is attractive is that it is a good entry point to Europe. You can start here and move on to bigger markets like France, Germany and Belgium."
On the 16th (local time) in Dudelange, Luxembourg, Kwon Yong-jun, head of the Precision Medicine Technology Center at the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) Integrated Biobank (IBBL), said Luxembourg can serve as a springboard for Korean corporations to advance into Europe.
Luxembourg has a population of only 690,000, and 320,000 are foreigners, accounting for nearly half. The domestic market is very small, but the high share of foreigners allows services to be tested on people from diverse backgrounds, and it is easy to reach government and regulators, so feedback comes quickly.
Kwon positions himself as a "bridge" consolidating Korean and European corporations and researchers. He actively uses the Korean network he built while working at Institut Pasteur Korea and Samsung Medical Center, and the European network he built in France and Luxembourg.
Kwon said, "Koreans often study in the United States, so there are many U.S. networks, but the European side is relatively weak, and even when they want to take on European projects, they often lack partners."
At the end of March this year, LIH opened a Korea office in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, home to many domestic hospitals and the National Cancer Center, and is stressing its role as a full-fledged gateway for Korean and European corporations and research institutions.
A flagship project Kwon is pursuing with Korean corporations and institutions is the "International Health Data Space Initiative (IHDSI)." LIH, the National Cancer Center and Naver Cloud are participating.
In the medical artificial intelligence (AI) race, the most important thing is standardized and reliable data. The key is securing large-scale patient data collected under the same criteria.
But a limitation is that patient medical data currently cannot be moved freely across institutions or countries due to issues such as privacy protection. IHDSI is an idea to solve cross-border movement of medical data by letting researchers perform only the necessary analyses in a secure, controlled virtual analysis environment without moving the data directly.
Kwon said, "Not every new drug is developed for only one race," adding, "If Korean data and European data can be compared together, research applicable to both East Asians and Westerners becomes possible."
The Precision Medicine Technology Center led by Kwon is a translational medicine research center that consolidates medical research results so they actually help patients.
Kwon likened his role to "gem cutting." When basic researchers or hospitals bring good disease models and patient samples, he refines them technically into technologies that industry can use in practice, treatment data to be used in hospitals, or data for basic researchers to use in follow-up studies.
He explained, "You need a precise diagnosis to deliver appropriate treatment, and if you accumulate treatment data, you can predict patient prognosis," adding, "When this data accumulates again, you can even make policies to prevent disease, so these are not separate strands of research but one cycle."
The current focus is on producing cancer organoids made by analyzing patients' genomes and administering multiple drugs to observe responses.
The strategy for Luxembourg as Kwon sees it is selection and concentration, and cooperation. It starts by acknowledging the weakness of limited population and resources. Then it secures sharp competitiveness by finding what it can do better than others and getting help from neighbors.
He said, "Luxembourg acknowledges that the country itself cannot run on its own citizens alone," adding, "Then it thinks about what it can do with help from its neighbors."