[Meet the CEO]Biotech pioneer seeks greater advances in genetics

While the study of biochemistry may conjure up impersonal images of petrie dishes and stainless steel labs for most, the research is directly related to the body, health and real life and will lead to advancements in medicine, benefiting many.

According to Seo Jeong-sun, CEO of Macrogen Inc., and biochemistry professor at Seoul National University, there has been the so-called "entrepreneur boom" among biologists since the mid 1990s worldwide. The human genome project began in the early 1990s, which means that knowledge of DNA in the human genome has been accumulated. It led to the tendency that biologists, with courage, came out of labs separating them from society to put their knowledge to use.

<**1>Macrogen Inc., a biotech company, started as a lab venture within Seoul National University in 1997. Since then it has grown into a company whose stock is listed on the nation`s tech-heavy Kosdaq and traded at 20,800 won on Friday.

"I followed the ongoing global trends when I joined the bandwagon of the biotech business," said Seo.

The professor-turned-CEO was a medicine researcher in genomics, a subfield of genetic engineering, at Seoul National University`s medical school. He started Macrogen with three of his friends in 1997. Before that, however, he had set up a biotech startup with two other U.S. professors in Texas in 1984. The company, called NUDON, went bankrupt four years later.

"Despite the business failure, I became more and more convinced about the prospect of individual, predictive, personalized medicine," said Seo.

A considerable number of believers in predictive, preventive medicine envision medicine that is customized with therapies that match the patients` genetic makeup, thus individualizing treatments.

"I would say that Macrogen`s vision lies in the realization of telemedicine in East Asia. Medicine will become customized and regionalized, since differences among individuals` genetic information are characterized as ethnic," said the 54-year-old CEO.

Macrogen`s business scope includes, but is not limited to, genome analysis, DNA chip technology, finding disease models, research on genetically engineered mice and bioinformatics.

"One of the company`s targets is to reduce the cost of individual genome analysis. It normally costs $150,000 and several days for a person`s genome analysis now, but, in a few years, we`ll cut that to $1,000 and within a day," said Seo.

The company completed a first of it`s kind genome project called Korean BAC (bacterial artificial chromosome) Clone Map in 2001. Further, it developed a particular strain that produces alcohol using zymomonas mobilis - featured in the journal Nature last January, and fatherless mice - featured in Nature in April, 2004.

"There will be only two viable businesses in the 21st century, namely the entertainment industry and biotech industry," said Seo.

It`s because the two are closely related with human happiness, according to Seo. The entertainment industry is what gives pleasure to people while the biotech industry epitomizes the desire to live healthy and long.

"The biotech industry undergoes the so-called `disruptive innovation,` which means that prior knowledge is rendered useless when new knowledge comes up," said Seo.

"Therefore, only small and nimble ventures will survive to deal with upcoming changes."

Macrogen estimates that it has a 70-80 percent market share domestically. Its total sales was 9 billion won ($8.69 million) in 2004.

(siyoungh@heralm.com)



By Hwang Si-young