SEOUL, July 29 (AJP) - A Seoul university better known for design and management has landed one of the year's larger national biotechnology awards, taking the lead role in a government project to mass-produce high-value biological materials that currently exist only in trace amounts in nature.
Kookmin University said Tuesday that a research team headed by Park Yong-cheol, a professor in its Department of Convergence Bioengineering, was selected as a new recipient under the advanced bio materials development program, part of the first round of 2026 bio-health research and development projects overseen by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources (MOTIR) and supported by the Korea Planning and Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (KEIT). The project runs through 2030 with a total budget of 22.2 billion won ($15.1 million), consisting of 15.9 billion won in government funding and 6.3 billion won from participating institutions.
The award places Kookmin at the center of a 17-member consortium of companies and research bodies, an unusual position for a university whose research profile in industrial biotechnology has grown quickly over the past several years. Park was selected in April for a separate core research grant from the National Research Foundation of Korea for work on precision fermentation using the food yeast Candida utilis. He received a ministerial award for research and development in biochemistry in 2022 and founded BioCraft, a brewing yeast company, in 2020.
Advanced biomaterials refer to substances made from living organisms, natural raw ingredients or bioprocess technology, with applications in medicine, chemicals, food and cosmetics. The project targets three of them: exosomes derived from microbes, high-purity vitamins and microbial lutein. All three are difficult and expensive to obtain at scale by conventional extraction, which is why the research aims to produce them inside engineered microorganisms instead.
Kookmin manages the overall project while three companies run the subprojects. Bio-FD&C leads work on bio production processes and commercialization for multifunctional beauty materials based on microbe-derived exosomes. Ace Biopharm handles mass production of high-purity vitamins through microbial processes and their development into functional products. Daebong LS runs the third subproject, covering biomanufacturing processes and commercialization technology for lutein produced by industrial microbes.
The research combines several approaches. The team plans to develop ultrafast microbial design methods built on synthetic biology and biofoundry platforms, fermentation and purification processes based on precision fermentation, and manufacturing process technology drawing on big data and deep learning. The goal is a production base for materials that occur naturally in only small quantities, along with a support system linking production through to finished products.
"This project is a large-scale research and development task in which 17 companies and institutions participate, linking production of high-function bio materials through to commercialization," Park said. "Based on synthetic biology, biofoundry and precision fermentation technology, we will develop technology that can support mass production and industrialization of advanced bio materials."
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