"In the past, it took biotech companies at least one to two years to develop a single protein. Since everything had to be done by hand, testing a few dozen candidates over two weeks was the maximum. But automated equipment processes around 2,000 at once. Once a public biofoundry is established in Korea, the burden of paying more than 100 million won ($70,000) per 1,000 candidates to overseas facilities will be resolved."
Lee Dae-hee, a researcher at the National Biofoundry Project Agency, made these remarks on Nov. 23 at the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB) in Daejeon, while entering the roughly 100-square-meter "Biofoundry BETA," a space lined with experimental equipment, during an interview with The Seoul Economic Daily.
A biofoundry is the core infrastructure that automates and accelerates the entire process of synthetic biology using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Just as semiconductors are produced in a foundry, the facility rapidly runs through the design-build-test-learn (DBTL) cycle of genes to quickly produce commercially viable bio solutions. Research results gathered in this process accumulate as standardized data, gradually raising the success rate of AI-driven gene design.
However, the BETA facility currently operated by KRIBB serves more as a preliminary research space for securing core biofoundry technologies. The full-scale National Biofoundry construction project began in January last year. The core goal is to complete by 2029 both a dedicated biofoundry center (four stories, total floor area of about 8,860 square meters) and an information technology (IT) platform for accumulating experimental data. Lee Seung-gu, head of the National Biofoundry Project Agency, explained, "We are building an integrated infrastructure that combines hardware and software."
The agency plans to secure an additional temporary space of about 500 square meters this year to fill the three-year gap before completion and to meet demand from companies that can be supported at the BETA facility.
Yet even when the National Biofoundry Center is completed, there are regrets that Korea will still face scale limitations in catching up with bio powerhouses such as the United States, Japan and China. This is the aftermath of repeated preliminary feasibility studies that substantially reduced the project's duration and budget. According to the first preliminary feasibility study report in 2021, the original plan targeted an eight-year project with a total budget of 743.4 billion won ($520 million), but the final project period was shortened to five years, and the budget was cut to about 126.3 billion won ($88 million), one-sixth of the initial target.
As a result, the infrastructure is insufficient to secure independent technologies across the diverse industrial fields where synthetic biology can be applied, such as medicine, food and energy. Synthetic biology has different processes depending on its application — red bio (disease prevention and treatment), green bio (crops) and white bio (environment and energy) — and research equipment cannot easily be shared between them.
On this point, Lee said, "Animal cells and other microorganisms require separate equipment to prevent contamination," explaining that the reduced equipment budget particularly shrank the share allocated to red bio. He added, "We have been receiving feedback that the red bio area is weak. The potential economic ripple effects that could be created in the medical field in the future are enormous, yet it is regrettable that it has been pushed down the priority list for the immediate reason that 'there is no market.'"
The number of "workflows" — key to accelerating research — has also been significantly reduced due to the budget cut. A workflow is a standardized operating route designed so that experimental equipment, connected through robotic technology, can run the DBTL cycle seamlessly without human intervention. The agency expects that opening these workflows to domestic industry-academia-research researchers to provide high-speed analysis services will substantially shorten research and development (R&D) and commercialization timelines. The agency is currently developing 37 workflows.
However, the original plan called for more than 10 additional workflows. Lee said, "Based on an initial demand survey of companies and researchers, we designed about 80 unit operations and 48 workflows, but it was not feasible within the actual budget limit. We narrowed the list to 37 by giving top priority to general-purpose functions such as gene assembly that can be used commonly across red, green and white bio fields. We aim to provide as diverse a range of services as possible through combinations between the workflows."
From the outset, the National Biofoundry's main purpose is to support the upstream processes common to companies, such as genome design and DNA synthesis, making it difficult to extend support to downstream (finished product manufacturing) or scale-up (mass production) services. In the long term, company-specific biofoundries will inevitably need to be built. With the functions and scope of workflows the National Biofoundry can provide already limited to a basic level, concerns are emerging that a significant reduction in the number of workflows offered could slow companies' product and solution development.
Ultimately, even after the public biofoundry is built, the task of advancing technology evenly across all R&D fields remains. Last year, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) similarly pointed out in its report "Data-Based Global Research Trends in Synthetic Biology and National Competitiveness Analysis," that "while leading bio-technology countries such as the United States show balanced growth across all fields, Korea's industrial development and applied research tend to be concentrated in the white bio area." The report added, "Considering the unlimited potential of synthetic biology, there is a need to expand R&D into the green and red bio areas."
