Bio Clusters in Korea
Bioclusters offer key competitive advantages with respect to three key variables: employment, innovation and productivity.
Productivity is enhanced by lowering transaction costs with non-commercial interdependencies. Innovation is dependent on the interactive knowledge exchange between different knowledge actors, promoted especially by the physical proximity of these actors in the cluster. Job creation is generated as a result of new business and is assisted by mentoring, availability of role-models, learning, communication and commercialisation gains that arise from operating in a cluster setting.1
For the distinctive benefits, Korea invested millions of dollars over 15 years to build bio clusters across the county. Not only limited, five main bio clusters in Korea are well establsihed and hosting hundreds of biotech venture companies.
1. Regional biotechnology – The EU biocluster study, Journal of Commercial Biotechnology, Volume 17, pages 209–217, (2011)
The Seoul Bio Hub is a support hub for biomedical startup companies. The hub provides an optimum environment for early-stage biomedical startups to engage in research and technology commercialization. It also assists prospective startups in preparing to launch their businesses.
Global biosimilar developer and producer Celltrion, bio-medicine contract manufacturing organization (CMO) Samsung Biologics, and biosimilar producer Samsung Bioepis are all located in Song do, as well as biotech companies and agencies and their professional human resources including foreign-invested enterprises supplying pharmaceutical ingredients and equipment, research centers, medical centers, and supporting agencies.
Korea Biopark has been the largest biotech complex in Korea with a total project cost of KRW 128 billion, two basement floors, seven above-ground floors and a gross floor area of 46,488 square meters.
Osong is home to the Osong Bio Valley and the Osong Biomedical District, where over 260 companies, universities, research institutes, hospitals and government agencies are integrated.
Dae Doek Bio Cluster
The companies registered in ‘Bio Venture Town’ surpassed cumulative sales of KRW 1 trillion in 2015, in 10 years since the opening, and 46 bio venture companies have been created. Of them, 9 have been listed on the stock market.
GC Biopharma, a South Korean biopharmaceutical company announced that it has completed the construction mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) production facility in its own vaccine production plant in Hwasun, Jeollanam-do, Korea at the end of 2023.
