[Why Korea 34] Korea Can Make the World's Drugs. Can It Invent the Next One?

A glowing drug candidate vial in a biotech research lab, symbolizing Korea’s challenge of turning manufacturing strength into new drug innovation.

Writing the last piece left me a little uneasy.

Following how Samsung Biologics built one of the world's largest CDMO capacities, and how Celltrion captured a dominant share of Europe's biosimilar market, I kept coming back to the same thought.

That's a story about making things with unmatched precision. It's not a story about inventing something the world has never seen.

The two skills are different. And the numbers make that difference clear, sometimes brutally so.

In September 2021, SK bioscience's stock hit a peak of 335,000 won. Its homegrown COVID-19 vaccine candidate, GBP510, had just become the first Korean-developed vaccine to enter Phase 3 trials, and expectations that Korea could produce its own vaccine were running high.

The vaccine actually arrived. The following year, GBP510 won approval under the name SKYCovione.

But the pandemic windfall ended, and R&D spending on next-generation vaccines and research facilities kept climbing. The question is whether the market reads that spending as future growth or as a cost with no clear payoff.

As of September 2026, the stock sits in the mid-30,000-won range.

Making the vaccine was the easy part. Turning that success into lasting company value turned out to be a different problem entirely.

A factory has a completion date. A new drug's success date is anyone's guess.

Which raises a bigger question: why hasn't Korea's manufacturing success translated into invention success?

Cause one: capital doesn't wait

A new drug typically takes ten to fifteen years to reach the market, and only a fraction of the candidates that enter clinical trials survive to final approval.

Korean capital markets aren't uniquely impatient. American biotechs see their stock cut in half after a single failed trial too.

The difference shows up after the failure.

In manufacturing, the skill that mattered was reducing failure. In drug development, the skill that matters is enduring it.

Korea is playing a game with different rules than the one it mastered in manufacturing.

Cause two: the path from failure to the next attempt is still thin

In a biotech ecosystem as large as America's, a failed company's people, patents, and drug candidates tend to move fairly easily to other firms, or become the seed of a new venture.

Licensing deals and open innovation are growing in Korea too, but the market where a failed project's talent, data, and patents naturally flow into the next company or the next pipeline is still relatively thin.

So the goal isn't building a structure that never fails.

It's building one that can try again after it does.

Cause three: policy runs on a different clock

It's not that government R&D support has been absent. For years, it drew criticism for leaning too heavily on quantitative metrics like paper counts and patent counts.

The real issue is timing.

New drug and foundational-technology research can take more than a decade. Government programs, budgets, and evaluation criteria tend to move on a shorter cycle.

What matters to a researcher isn't just how much funding grew this year.

It's whether that direction holds five years from now, or ten.

Research time and policy time still haven't fully synced up.

Then, someone broke through

In 2015, Yuhan Corporation licensed in an early-stage candidate from Genosco, the U.S. subsidiary of Oscotech. That candidate became lazertinib, the lung cancer drug now sold as Leclaza.

In 2018, Yuhan out-licensed it to Janssen in a deal worth up to $1.255 billion. Development continued from there, and the FDA approved it in 2024. Commercialization has since expanded to the U.S., Japan, China, and Europe, and the upfront payments and milestones Yuhan has collected so far total more than $300 million.

What stands out is where it started.

This wasn't a drug that emerged fully formed from a giant, well-resourced lab. A small biotech's early candidate was picked up and developed by Yuhan, and a global pharmaceutical company carried it through late-stage trials and commercialization.

Discover a promising candidate, have one company develop it, have a larger company carry it to the global market — that's also a legitimate way to bring a new drug into the world.

Someone has also gone the whole distance themselves.

SK Biopharmaceuticals took cenobamate, an epilepsy drug, from candidate discovery all the way through U.S. approval and direct sales. Xcopri, approved by the FDA in 2019, is still expanding in the U.S. market today.

Lazertinib isn't the only case.

But what Korean biotech needs isn't two such stories. It needs twenty, or a hundred.

Signs of change: policy is starting to shift too

There are recent signs of an attempt to change the underlying structure.

Korea's proposed 2027 R&D budget stands at 39.5 trillion won, up 11.2% from 2026. Of that, 2.2 trillion won is earmarked for advanced bio-technology and 3.6 trillion won for basic research.

The government has also begun introducing an "investment-style R&D" model alongside its traditional grant system — one where it recovers equity value from successful research and reinvests it elsewhere. It's an attempt to change how the country funds research that carries a high chance of failure but equally high potential impact.

Whether this model can actually protect a researcher's ten-year timeline remains to be seen.

But the direction is different from before.

Rather than trying to eliminate failure, Korea has started thinking about how to let failure feed into the next attempt.

So, Why Korea?

Can a country that mastered precision manufacturing also learn to invent?

Lazertinib alone doesn't settle the question.

Capital needs to learn to wait longer. The market that carries failed research into the next attempt needs to grow thicker. And policy's clock needs to move closer to research's clock.

Korea learned how to reduce failure in manufacturing.

What drug development requires now isn't eliminating failure — it's building the structure that lets failure lead somewhere.

A structure that lets you start again after you fail.

Isn't that the real infrastructure an inventing nation needs?

Curious about Korea?

So am I.

Key Takeaways

Korea built world-class manufacturing competitiveness in CDMO and biosimilars, but drug discovery is a fundamentally different game — one that demands long-horizon capital and tolerance for high failure rates.
SK bioscience's SKYCovione became Korea's first homegrown COVID-19 vaccine to win approval in 2022, but the post-pandemic market and rising R&D costs quickly changed the picture.
Lazertinib (Leclaza) is a landmark open-innovation case: a small biotech's candidate, licensed in and developed by Yuhan, carried to FDA approval and global commercialization through partnership with a multinational pharma company.
SK Biopharmaceuticals' Xcopri is a rarer case — one where a Korean company took a candidate from discovery through U.S. approval and direct sales itself.
Korean biotech's next challenge isn't eliminating failure. It's building the structure that lets failure carry over into the next research effort and the next company.

[Why Korea 29] Korea Beat NASA and MIT to Build a Disaster Robot. Then What?

Earthquakes. Fires. Building collapses. Every time I see one of these stories on the news, I find myself thinking the same thing. What if something other than a person could go first — into the rubble of a collapsed building, into a tunnel filling with gas, into a facility leaking radiation? Convenience isn't a good enough reason to explain why we build robots. Factory arms and restaurant servers save us time and effort, sure. But follow humanity's old obsession with robots far enough back, and you land on something more urgent than convenience. The wish to send something other than a person into the places people can't go. If the danger itself can't be removed, at least make sure a human doesn't have to walk into it first. That wish was put to a very serious test once. Here's how. A Competition for Robots That Go in Our Place The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster left robotics researchers around the world with an uncomfortable question: if we had the tec...

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