[인사이트코리아=노철중 기자] Yuhan Corporation (CEO, Wook-Je Cho) announced on the 23rd that it was listed as the second largest shareholder by investing an additional 10 billion won in April Bio, which has Serum Albumin Fragment Associated (SAFA) technology.
Established in 2013, April Bio is a new antibody drug company that develops global innovative new drugs in a variety of therapeutic areas using its proprietary human antibody library (HuDVFab) technology and SAFA, a sustained platform technology that can increase the half-life of antibody fragment utilization.
April Bio is preparing for phase 1 clinical trial in the United States this year, APB-A1, a preclinical inflammatory autoimmune disease drug (IL-18 target), APB-R3, male infertility treatment (FSH target) APB -R2, etc. are being developed.
Recently, April Bio decided to issue a paid-in capital increase of 10 billion won worth to a third party for Yuhan Corporation. When attracting 18 billion won worth of Series B investment in 2020, Yuhan Corporation also acquired a 4.89% stake by investing 3 billion won in April Bio as a strategic investor (SI).
Since then, Yuhan Corporation and April Bio have signed a’Joint Research New Drug Development Business Agreement’ and are strengthening research cooperation.
Yuhan’s additional investment was to further accelerate joint research using it in the future as the excellence of SAFA, an independent platform technology owned by April Bio, was recognized.