Ildong Pharmaceutical(249420) group has moved to reorganize its research and development (R&D) strategy to secure future growth engines. It plans to consolidate new drug development organizations and asset with Ildong Pharmaceutical and strengthen R&D capabilities with a two-track strategy centered on "sustainable growth" and "future growth."
The core of this strategy is to bring together new drug development capabilities at Ildong Pharmaceutical. It merged the new drug development subsidiary Unovia to integrate asset and personnel and unified the project execution system. At the group level, it also plans to bundle the development functions of affiliates such as Idience and Ildong BMS into a single system to improve collaboration and decision-making efficiency.
The two-track strategy focuses on securing both short-term results and future growth engines at the same time. In the fields of gastroenterology, cardiovascular, and metabolic diseases, it will focus on developing improved new drugs with high commercialization potential to secure a stable revenue base, while strategically fostering next-generation technology areas such as targeted protein degradation (TPD), antibody-drug conjugates (ADC), small interfering RNA (siRNA), messenger RNA (mRNA), collectively referred to as xRNA-based therapeutics. It also plans to expand open innovation with external biotech ventures and global corporations.
Project MARS II to accelerate new drug development will also go into full operation. Based on experience developing candidate substances in the glucagon-like peptide (GLP)-1 receptor agonist and potassium-competitive acid blocker (P-CAB) classes secured through existing projects, it will expand follow-up pipelines, and, by using an artificial intelligence (AI)-based platform, aims to shorten the candidate discovery period from the current four to five years to about one to two years.
The lead pipelines are an oral GLP-1 receptor agonist (ID110521156) and a P-CAB class therapy, "fexuprazan." ID110521156 recently confirmed up to 13.8% weight loss over four weeks and safety in a phase 1 trial. Fexuprazan is being co-developed with Daewon Pharmaceutical and recently entered a phase 3 trial in Korea.
Development by affiliates is also continuing. Ildong BMS is developing autoimmune disease treatments and TPD-based anticancer drugs, while Idience is developing the PARP inhibitor "benadaparib," which targets DNA damage repair in cancer cells, along with ADCs and a pan-KRAS inhibitor.
Benadaparib has received orphan drug and priority review (fast track) designations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is currently in a phase 2a gastric cancer trial in Korea and the United States.
Ildong Pharmaceutical group plans to accelerate the commercialization of new drugs by actively pursuing technology transfer (license-out) and joint development of promising candidates alongside clinical development.