MD Healthcare Inc. (CEO Yoon-Keun Kim) signed a license agreement for joint development and exclusive commercialization of inflammatory diseases and cancer treatments in the Asian territory using microbiome extracellular vesicles (EVs) with Kolmar Korea Co. The agreement was signed at Kolmar Korea Institute of Technology (Seocho-gu, Seoul).

Through this agreement, MD Healthcare will receive a certain percentage of royalties for technology transfer fees and sales according to clinical development, licensing, and commercialization, including down payments that are not obligated to return.

In addition, when Kolmar Korea transfers technology to a third party, the profits will be distributed between the two companies at a pre-agreed ratio.

The pipeline licensed out by MD Healthcare is an innovative material based on the extracellular vesicles (EV) isolated from Lactobacillus, a representative beneficial bacterium, for the purpose of developing new drugs for the treatment of cancer and inflammatory diseases.

With this contract, Kolmar Korea has obtained the patent for the use of Lactobacillus EVs (Registration No. 10-2098067, PCT/KR2019/010267) held by MD Healthcare and secured exclusive rights for use in the Asia territory including Korea, China, and Japan.

The two companies plan to use this material to develop treatments for inflammatory diseases such as pneumonia, asthma, and inflammatory enteritis caused by respiratory viruses like coronavirus in addition to treatment of intractable cancers such as lung, colon, and liver cancer.

Consumption of probiotics for health involves the ingestion of the bacteria and there are a variety of challenges in the development of probiotics as pharmaceuticals. Rather than acting on our body directly, probiotic bacteria secrete EVs from the intestine as a key function of their efficacy.

Therefore, MD Healthcare is focused on innovating the microbiome space through the development of microbiome EVs directly. Microbial extracellular vesicles pass through the intestinal mucosa and are directly absorbed by the cells of our body. Microbial EVs show promising pharmacological action and are produced through traditional bacteria culturing methods, thus attracting attention due to its merit as a pharmacological agent.

It is known that microbiome-derived EVs transferred from MD Healthcare to Kolmar Korea are absorbed into our body and perform key immune and metabolic functions. As the balance between beneficial bacteria and harmful bacteria-derived EVs circulating in our body is attracting attention as a major factor determining health and disease, MD Healthcare and Kolmar Korea will develop pharmaceuticals using EVs derived from the microbiome.

MD Healthcare is a bio-venture company that develops precision medical products by converging intelligent technologies such as microbiome-related life science technology, EV-related nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. MD Healthcare has established several innovative new drug pipelines that treat intractable diseases such as cancer, inflammatory diseases, CNS diseases, and metabolic-cardiovascular diseases based on its proprietary precision medical platform (MD NanoBiome^TM).

Further, MD Healthcare has also completed internal clinical performance evaluation of its in vitro diagnostic AI software for solid cancers such as lung, liver, pancreatic, stomach, colon, breast, ovarian, and bladder cancer through urine EV microbiome genetic data (Next Generation Sequencing).

MD Healthcare possesses a number of core technologies for precision medicine by convergence of microbiome, EV, and AI technologies. The intellectual property rights it has held so far include 64 domestic and 15 overseas patents (US, Europe, etc.) for a total of 79 patents.

In addition to the patent for Lactobacillus EVs, upon which this license agreement was issued, MD Healthcare holds patents for more than 60 types of EV treatments.

Kolmar Korea, a global pharmaceutical, cosmetics, and health functional food R&D and manufacturing company, is enhancing its business competitiveness through active investment.

Among them, the pharmaceutical sector acquired HK inno.N (at the time CJ Healthcare) to reinforce a new drug development platform. In the health functional food sector, Kolmar B&H built production bases in China as well as domestically in Korea for the expansion of its global business.

Kim Yoon-Keun, CEO of MD Healthcare, said, "We plan to introduce new bio drugs through continuous technology improvement and active business development in cooperation with Kolmar Korea, a representative company of Korea. Thus, we plan to lay the framework for the sustainable growth of the bio industry.”

CEO Kim Byeong-mook of Kolmar Korea said, "We will develop innovative medicines with MD Healthcare, a promising microbiome research leader, using microbiome technology that has been gaining attention in both academia and industry."

 

Link: http://m.healthmedia.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=77628