Samsung Biologics' research lab: the engine behind its 'tech-to-factory' contract strategy

"Samsung Biologics is a contract manufacturing factory — so why does it have more than 100 researchers with master's and doctoral degrees doing biotech research in-house?"

It is a question anyone unfamiliar with the global biotech industry might reasonably ask. At first glance, it could look as though a contract development and manufacturing organization is trying to develop its own drugs. In reality, it is a calculated move to maintain a decisive edge in an intensely competitive global CDMO market.

Samsung Biologics, long focused on expanding large-scale production capacity, has been quietly reinforcing its early-stage research and development organization.

The logic is straightforward. By getting global pharmaceutical companies to adopt Samsung's proprietary technologies at the very earliest stages of drug development, the company aims to make it difficult for those clients to take their commercial manufacturing business elsewhere — a strategy known as "early lock-in" that is designed to secure future contracts potentially worth trillions of won.

Jung Hyung-nam, executive vice president and head of Samsung Biologics' Bio Research Institute, laid out the institute's true purpose and what he described as a new survival equation for the global CDMO market at a press briefing June 24 (local time) at the San Diego Convention Center, on the sidelines of the 2026 BIO International Convention.

"The Bio Research Institute is not a place that develops and sells its own drugs — it is an organization that develops core technologies to maximize the efficiency of our contract manufacturing business," Jung said. "Major global CDMO competitors are already doing the same thing: developing their own platform technologies, licensing them out to global biotech companies, and converting those relationships into large-scale manufacturing contracts."

Samsung Biologics established its Bio Research Institute in July 2022 to pursue early-stage technology research. It currently employs about 100 researchers holding master's or doctoral degrees across the life sciences.

The company has recently formalized a Technology Business Development Group within the institute, dedicated to managing technology-driven business opportunities.

The institute is accelerating its push to secure and internalize next-generation biotech source technologies, drawing on its existing Life Science Fund No. 1 and No. 2 vehicles as well as a 200 billion won ($130 million) Life Science Fund No. 3 that began operation this month. The strategy calls for aggressive investment in promising global biotech firms with AI- and machine learning-based protein design capabilities or next-generation gene-editing technologies.

Platform technologies the institute has developed — including bispecific antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates and blood-brain barrier shuttle platforms — are then licensed out to external drug developers. Client companies reduce the risk of drug development failure by drawing on Samsung Biologics' validated technology platforms, while Samsung Biologics stands to capture the entire commercial manufacturing volume once a drug reaches commercialization — a "turnkey" effect. These platform-linked contracts, which can reach into the trillions of won, serve as a reliable tool for defending factory utilization rates and securing long-term customers.

A second pillar of the institute's work is transforming how Samsung Biologics' factories operate. Central to that effort is continuous manufacturing technology. Traditional biopharmaceutical production relies on a batch process: cells are placed in large tanks, cultured in a single run, and then the process is halted so that purification and analysis can be carried out separately. Continuous manufacturing, by contrast, links culturing, purification and analysis into an uninterrupted, seamless sequence.

Because the approach eliminates the need for large tanks and expansive floor space, factories can operate in a leaner footprint while cutting production costs dramatically through greater material efficiency. Through case studies, the Bio Research Institute has achieved roughly double the productivity of conventional continuous manufacturing methods.

"We have established a hybrid continuous manufacturing process that can be used alongside existing production methods, and we have internalized the related automation technologies," Jung said. "We will gradually build out continuous manufacturing GMP facilities and bring them online in line with market demand."

The results from technologies the institute has developed and brought to market are encouraging. Samsung Biologics' proprietary bispecific antibody platform, S-DUAL, has fully resolved the impurity problem that arises when two different antibodies are artificially joined. By embedding a snap-button-like structure at the antibody binding site, the platform blocks the eight types of mismatched pairings that occur naturally and enables high-purity production of a single, precisely defined structure. Animal model studies in gastric and breast cancer showed superior tumor-suppression efficacy compared with existing approved drugs, and safety is currently being validated in primate trials.

The technology is evolving into a bispecific ADC platform — a next-generation precision oncology tool. Through a joint research program with Aimed Bio, Samsung Biologics has secured a proprietary linker-payload system that delivers a cytotoxic payload to target cancer cells. The platform demonstrates a strong bystander effect, simultaneously killing not only targeted cancer cells but also neighboring cancer cells that would otherwise go undetected. It also suppresses the drug-resistance mechanism by which cancer cells pump out therapeutic agents — substantially reducing the toxicity problems that have been a critical weakness of existing ADC drugs.

The institute is also developing a new BBB shuttle platform free from side effects such as red blood cell damage, aimed at solving the longstanding challenge of getting therapeutic drugs across the blood-brain barrier. In the mRNA field, which has been in a slump since the COVID-19 vaccine era, the institute has secured a sequence platform technology that raises protein expression levels more than threefold and sharply lowers production costs, with plans to expand its application to CAR-T therapies and beyond.

"Competition in the global market is so fierce that you have to prepare your technology before you even make eye contact," Jung said. "We will fully internalize world-class production platforms and early-stage next-generation modality technologies, and build a technology lead wide enough that global pharmaceutical companies come to us first."