Mustard Seed Growth Center, Dankook University's WMD Center sign MOU for healthcare commercialization

The Mustard Seed Growth Center, jointly operated by the Catholic Educational Foundation and Catholic University of Korea's Seoul St. Mary's Hospital, announced Sunday it will collaborate with Dankook University's Wearable Manufacturing Data Platform Center, known as the WMD Center.

The two institutions signed a mutual cooperation agreement at the WMD Center on Thursday afternoon, with key working-level officials from both sides in attendance. Following the signing ceremony, representatives from both organizations toured the WMD Center's specialized studios and advanced manufacturing facilities, sharing plans for future operations and support.

The agreement was pursued to help the Mustard Seed Growth Center — now in its sixth year — successfully establish its "commercialization track," which launched its first pilot run this year with 11 teams. The participating teams are currently focused on research and development with the goal of exhibiting prototypes at the 2026 Korea Healthcare & Healthtech Fair, or KHF, scheduled for August.

The commercialization track teams had previously struggled to individually identify and vet outside vendors for 3D modeling design and prototype production as they worked to turn innovative ideas into tangible products. The partnership with the WMD Center came through a recommendation by The Circle Co., an AI-based industry-academia-research collaboration matching platform.

The WMD Center is a specialized institution that receives government subsidies from the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and operates advanced studios for empirical, manufacturing and human data. It provides ongoing customized consulting services covering 3D design drawing production, prototype development support, 3D printing output, reverse-engineering data, and body measurement and activity data.

Through the agreement, the Mustard Seed Growth Center has further formalized its support framework to ensure that innovative ideas originating from medical settings can advance beyond mere proposals to the stage of verifying actual product viability.

Building on this agreement, the center plans to expand support beyond the currently selected commercialization track teams to include competition track participants as well. It also intends to invite WMD Center practitioners to deliver special lectures as part of the competition track's education program, and to provide matching support so that pre-prototype models can be designed from the earliest stages of idea development — an approach the center describes as an advanced two-track strategy.

Kim Dae-jin, director of the Mustard Seed Growth Center and a professor, said the partnership "lays a solid foundation for our future committee members' fresh healthcare ideas to take shape as highly refined, physical prototypes through the WMD Center's cutting-edge infrastructure and consulting." He added that the center would provide full support so the collaboration "can serve as a successful industry-academia cooperation model for the startup ecosystem in Korea's medical and healthcare sector."

Since its founding in 2021, the center has annually selected and nurtured "future committee members" — emerging talent set to lead the next generation of medicine — through an innovation and startup idea competition. Having declared 2026 the year of full-scale commercialization, the center is accelerating efforts to establish a practical business model encompassing prototype production, technology transfer and participation in the KHF expo.