Bridge Bio Upon Being Selected as an Innovative Company…”Expanding Research Personnel”

Bridge Biotherapeutics (Bridge Bio), an 'innovative pharmaceutical company,' is to expand its new drug research center in Pangyo and strengthen its research forces.

 The company plans to focus on developing innovative new drug candidates by expanding research and clinical organizations.

On January 27th, an official from Bridge Bio said in a telephone interview with <WikiLeaks Korea>, “We are recruiting more than 10 researchers while expanding the Innovative New Drug Research Institute at our Pangyo headquarters by about three times this year. We will run a sustainable business by introducing our own development projects".

The official added, "We also hired a large number of people in the clinical team, such as clinical trial design, drug monitoring, clinical statistics, project management, and clinical operation.“

The company-affiliated research institute, the predecessor of the New Drug Research Institute, started research in 2016 in a laboratory space leased from Sungkyunkwan University. 

Then, it has moved to the Pangyo Research Institute in 2019 to start researching innovative new drugs, increasing the number of researchers from one to four, and this year, it will carry out large-scale recruitments along with space expansion.

The Boston Discovery Center, which is operated as a US subsidiary, is concentrating on research on discovering innovative anti-cancer drugs based on chemical proteomics technology, and is seeking collaboration through interacting with six world-class companies in Basel, Switzerland.

New drug pipelines, which are in the clinical development stage, include 'BBT-176', a candidate for non-small cell lung cancer targeting C797S-containing positive triple mutations (adopted from the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology), and 'BBT-207', a candidate for non-small cell lung cancer targeting C797S-containing positive double mutations (developed by Bridge Bio).
Bridge Bio has a strategy to achieve results in an "open innovation" method that incorporates its development capabilities into the capacity of introducing candidate materials strengthened through new drug development platform companies.

Recently, Bridge Bio was selected as an innovative pharmaceutical company certified by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in recognition of its innovativeness in research and development activities, achievements in open innovation activities, social responsibility, ethics, and transparency.

In the third quarter of last year, Bridge Bio's sales were 1 billion won with net loss of 33.8 billion won.

Its ordinary R&D expense was 26.9 billion won, up by 13 billion won from the same period last year. Through fund raising in the first half of last year, the company has 60 billion won and cash assets as of the third quarter settlement.

[WIKI KOREA=Cho Eun, Reporter]