Samsung Bioepis, Proteina team up to develop AI-based antibody drugs

Samsung Bioepis is accelerating its push into AI-based antibody drug development by joining forces with a promising domestic biotech, drawing on its global-caliber antibody research and development capabilities.

Samsung Bioepis and Proteina announced Thursday they had signed a license option agreement to commercialize results from a government-funded R&D project on AI-driven antibody drug development. The total contract value was not disclosed, in accordance with the two companies' agreement.

The deal is a follow-on contract to a national R&D project — "Development and Demonstration of Antibody Biopharmaceuticals Using AI Models" — overseen by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Samsung Bioepis and Proteina have been jointly pursuing the project since October alongside a research team led by Baek Min-kyung, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Seoul National University.

The two companies will collaborate with the goal of identifying AI-designed antibody drug candidates by 2027. Under the arrangement, Proteina will handle candidate discovery and validation, while Samsung Bioepis will lead preclinical research through to an investigational new drug application. If Samsung Bioepis subsequently exercises its license option, it will take full responsibility for clinical development and commercialization, paying Proteina milestone fees and royalties at each stage.

The partnership has drawn attention as a meeting of two companies with distinct technological strengths. Samsung Bioepis has received approval for 11 biosimilar products from major regulators including the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency, and has never had an IND application rejected — a track record that reflects its world-class antibody R&D capabilities.

Proteina is a biotech with a proprietary ultra-high-throughput antibody engineering and performance-measurement platform. The platform cuts a validation process that previously took several months down to two weeks, and can simultaneously analyze more than 10,000 antibody sequences per week, fundamentally eliminating bottlenecks in drug development. The collaboration also marks a tangible outcome of a large company's efforts to nurture promising emerging technologies: Yoon Tae-young, chief executive of Proteina, received support from the Samsung Future Technology Incubation Foundation for five years beginning in 2014.

Kim Kyung-ah, president of Samsung Bioepis, said the agreement would allow the company to extend the process-optimization expertise it had built through biosimilar development into the antibody drug space. "We will faithfully carry out the government's national R&D project through close collaboration with our partner," she said.

Yoon said the contract marked a pivotal step beyond the research stage. "By combining AI with an experimental validation platform to break through the bottlenecks of drug development, we have now entered an important demonstration phase where that work can translate into actual new drugs," he said.