SK Biopharmaceuticals, a drug development unit of South Korea’s telecom-to-energy conglomerate  SK Group, announced on April 18 that it has signed a contract with US-based biotech company twoXAR to co-develop a new drug for treating non-small cell lung cancer.

Non-small cell lung cancer is the most common type of the disease accounting for around 85 percent of the total patients. In 2018, around 2 million additional patients were diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer.

The California-based company has a platform using artificial intelligence tech, which can assist in developing the new drug. SK Biopharma, which established its AI platform for new drug development with its own data from past experiments last year, hopes to work with the US company to ultimately form a platform that can find out effectiveness and safety of the new drugs more easily.

“We are sure that if we combine twoXAR’s AI tech and our drug-developing experience, we will be able to shorten the time spent for developing new drug candidates,” an SK Biopharma official Maeng Chul-young said in a statement.

Meanwhile, SK Biopharma is currently also preparing to go public on the main bourse Kospi. The Korean company recently chose NH Investment & Securities and Korea Investment and Securities as its IPO manager.

By Song Seung-hyun (ssh@heraldcorp.com)