Kakao Brain Invests 5 Billion KRW in AI Drug Development Company 'Galaxy'

[Asia Economy Reporter Kang Nahum] Kakao's AI research subsidiary Kakao Brain announced on the 16th that it has invested 5 billion KRW in Galaxy, a new drug design platform company utilizing AI.

Kakao Brain plans to build a new drug design platform by integrating Galaxy's new drug design technology with a super-large AI model to enter and establish itself early in the global AI new drug development market. At the same time, it will proceed with joint development of new drug candidates and digitization of existing chemistry-based experiments.

Galaxy utilizes protein modeling technology that ranked 1st to 3rd in international protein structure prediction competitions and protein interaction prediction competitions over the past 10 years at Seoul National University. The founder, CEO Cha-ok Seok, who is a professor at Seoul National University, established Galaxy to pursue AI-based new drug development after seeing Google DeepMind's AlphaFold achieve results in protein structure prediction in a short period. The goal is to build a new drug design platform applicable not only to specific new drugs but also to many types of new drugs targeting various diseases.

Currently, the new drug development process takes an average of 5 years and 670 million USD just for candidate substance development, and the success rate of new drug development up to clinical trials is known to be less than 10%. Utilizing AI in new drug development is expected to drastically reduce time and cost, enabling new drugs to be supplied more cheaply and quickly.

Kim Ildu, CEO of Kakao Brain, said, "By expanding Kakao Brain's unique AI large-scale capabilities to the field of new drug development, we will do our best to help Galaxy become a global top-tier company in AI-based new drug design."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.