SK bioscience CEO Ahn Jae-yong speaks during a press conference held online on Thursday. Courtesy of SK bioscience

By Kim Jae-heun

SK bioscience will spend 1.6 trillion won ($1.31 billion) to acquire competitive vaccine and bioscience companies on its home turf and abroad, as well as develop innovative medical products, it said, Thursday. The company also said it will do everything necessary to receive government authorization for domestic use of its COVID-19 vaccine, GBP510, by June.

"We are in talks with multiple companies for strategic investment and research and development cooperation to secure new platforms such as mRNA," SK bioscience CEO Ahn Jae-yong said. "We also expect GBP510 to get approval (from the government) within the first half of this year. Although we were late in developing a COVID-19 vaccine compared with other multinational pharmaceutical companies, it still has competency in the current situation in which we are entering the endemic phase."

SK bioscience is waiting for the results of GBP510's Phase 3 clinical trials, which are set to come out in the next month, at the earliest.

SK bioscience's vaccine candidate is developed with the same synthetic antigen methods used for existing vaccines of influenza and hepatitis B. And because they share the same platform, the company said GBP510 is relatively safe and it can be refrigerated between 2 degrees Celsius to 8 degrees Celsius during distribution, which is one of its strengths. The government signed a pre-order recently for 10 million vaccine doses from SK bioscience.

After the domestic approval of GBP510, the local biotech company plans to apply for authorization of its vaccine candidate with the European Medicines Agency and the World Health Organization in the third quarter of this year. It is also conducting research to utilize it for booster shots and youth vaccinations.

Apart from the GBP510, SK bioscience is diversifying its vaccine portfolio for COVID-19.

The company will develop a "multi-purpose vaccine" in response to the possible outbreaks of future COVID-19 variants, a "combo vaccine" that targets the flu and COVID-19 simultaneously and a "sarbecovirus" vaccine that utilizes the COVID-19 development platform. In addition, it plans to produce a "nose spray" drug that prevents COVID-19 infection for a certain period of time.