"The 2021 Biokorea conference held in Seoul displays some of the most impressive milestones reached by the country’s leading bio firms and researchers."
Most notable at the convention were innovations related to COVID-19.
The researchers' work displayed at the event shows their efforts to improve the process of battling the disease, from virus prevention to diagnosis.
"BIOT have developed a robot that medical workers can use during COVID-19 testing to extract specimens from the testees without any contact. It diminishes the risk of infection, lessens the pain of testing, and is much more affordable than competing products."
New technology could give South Korea the ability to spearhead vaccine development in a potential future pandemic,.. with the government directing funds to the long-term research of domestic vaccines.
And at the head of that research is Professor Seong Baik-lin.
"Rapid production technology needs continued development. We need to start getting ready now to develop this technology so that South Korea comes out as a front-runner ready for another pandemic that might come in the future."
What he and his team are working through the weekends trying to achieve is creating a game-changing platform that speeds up the development process of safe and effective synthetic vaccines.
"Behind the AstraZeneca vaccines, there were 230 years of research that can be traced back to Edward Jenner's small pox vaccines. We can't put in 200 years, but what are we Koreans good at? Shortening and speeding up the process. I think building this platform will be possible in 20 years."
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