Busan City and Prestige BioPharma Collaborate, Designated as 'Advanced Investment Zone' in Cutting-Edge Pharmaceutical Field

The Only Research Facility in the Advanced Investment Zone

Center of the Advanced Pharmaceutical Virtuous Cycle Ecosystem

Busan City announced that the Prestige BioPharma Innovative Discovery Center, an advanced pharmaceutical company located in Busan Myeongji New Town, has been designated as an Advanced Investment Zone by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, which held a public recruitment for local governments in April this year.

Prestige BioPharma IDC bird's-eye view.

The Advanced Investment Zone provides customized support and regulatory exemptions to domestic and foreign companies investing in advanced industries. Along with the materials, parts, and equipment (SoBuJang) specialized complex, it is a core project of the Materials, Parts, and Equipment 2.0 strategy responding to the global supply chain restructuring.

The Materials, Parts, and Equipment 2.0 strategy is a government plan to strengthen industrial competitiveness in response to global supply chain restructuring, including Japan’s export regulations.

Once designated as an Advanced Investment Zone, resident companies can receive benefits such as long-term land leases, reductions in rent and charges, special support for local investment promotion subsidies, designation of minimum zones for location regulations, regulatory exemptions, and priority support for national financial projects.

This year, for the first time, 11 sites from 6 local governments applied for designation as Advanced Investment Zones, and as a result of committee review, 9 sites from 5 local governments were selected.

Chungnam Province and Jeonbuk Province each have 3 sites, while Busan City, Ulsan City, and Gyeonggi Province each have 1 site. Most of these are manufacturing facilities in fields such as electric vehicles, secondary batteries, semiconductors, and other manufacturing sectors, whereas Busan is the only city with research facilities in the advanced pharmaceutical field.

Prestige BioPharma, headquartered in Singapore, is strengthening its antibody drug and vaccine research and development (R&D) business targeting the global market, centered on the Innovative Discovery Center (IDC).

Prestige BioPharma, which decided to invest in Busan in May 2021, began construction of the Innovative Discovery Center (IDC) in January 2022 and is scheduled to complete it in the first half of 2024. This year, it achieved the great success of applying for and being selected as an Advanced Investment Zone in cooperation with Busan City.

Prestige BioPharma IDC Groundbreaking Ceremony.

In May, it signed a business agreement with Dong-A University to jointly nurture regional convergence talents through programs such as on-site internship semesters and employment-linked on-site internship programs.

In particular, the second floor of the research institute will be developed as an Open Innovation space to focus on creating an R&D value chain through joint research and development with biotechnology (bio) venture companies and university research institutes.

Mayor Park Hyung-jun said, “The global bio industry is growing at an average annual rate of 9.6%, and it is a high value-added industry with a market expected to reach 56 trillion won by 2026. Taking this special zone designation as an opportunity, we will actively support sharing the process of developing and commercializing core technologies in the pharmaceutical and bio fields with the local community, and establish a virtuous cycle ecosystem for bio R&D in industry-academia-research collaboration in related fields to further strengthen Busan’s bio capabilities.”

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