In the development of biopharmaceuticals, mostly based on large proteins, viruses, and cells, conventional approaches normally involve intuitive modifications of only a part or component of the complex bio-entities. These fragmented approaches have often shown critical limitations as exemplified by unexpected serious side effects of the conventionally developed biopharmaceutical products.

Instead, we newly apply systems-level genetic and genomic design-based strategies to create and develop various biopharmaceuticals much more effectively. We see the development of complex bio-entities based biopharmaceuticals as intelligent connections of their constituent parts or component biomolecules.

Our approaches involve the selection of useful components from biomolecules and genetic parts existing in nature and generation of artificial ones from the screening of genetic libraries. We also employ computational genetic and genomic models to design the optimized connections of the components for certain therapeutic purposes. The model-based design strategies will facilitate and accelerate the development of highly potent biopharmaceuticals to treat various diseases.

Bio Design Lab (BDL) aims to develop gene, cell, immuno-therapies. Lack of efficient and safe vectors has hampered the development of the next-generation therapies. We are currently focusing on advancing retroviral and lentiviral vectors in terms of transduction efficiency and safety. By applying various genetic engineering approaches, we have been able to greatly enhance the transduction efficiency and reduce tumorigenicity of the key viral vectors up to multiple folds. In addition, BDL develops various additional genetic platforms to fuel the advances in gene-, cell-, immune-therapies.