The coronavirus has brought a lot of attention to the Medical industry in South Korea. South Korea has been praised not only for its fast response but also for its innovative technologies regarding testing for the coronavirus. One reason is that medical startups in Korea are looking to incorporate the latest technologies into existing services. The use of AI in the healthcare industry in South Korea exploded in 2019 and 2020. By 2021, Korean investors were investing much of their money into Korean medical startups incorporating AI technologies into their products and services. In addition, Corporations and Universities in Korea are increasing their partnerships with AI startups that can help them compete with newer players entering the space.
AI simplifies the lives of doctors, patients, and hospital staff by performing tasks typically done by humans. However, AI technology can do this in less time and at a much lower cost.
Now in 2024, AI medical startups in Korea are looking into links between genetic codes, robots that can perform surgeries, or software that can improve the efficiency of a hospital. In addition, a lot of funding is going into these healthcare startups because Korea is starting to realize the importance of having a solid and innovative healthcare industry. Some of the top healthcare startups in Asia are from South Korea because many are incorporating new technologies like AI, Big Data, and 3D printing. Therefore, some leading medical startups in Korea are using Artificial Intelligence to revolutionize the healthcare industry.
Lunit is a Korean medical AI software company focusing on deep learning and medical data. They are devoted to discovering, designing, and developing data-driven imaging biomarkers. These biomarkers help bring high accuracy and efficiency in diagnosis and treatment. In addition, Lunit focuses on radiology and cancer treatment. Their product Lunit Insight CXR-Nodule is a web-based AI medical image diagnostic software. It helps make accurate diagnostics for lung cancer. Furthermore, they have tested their accuracy through clinical trials at Seoul National University Hospital. Currently, they are looking to sell their products and services to the global market.
“Data-driven medicine using AI technology has some similarity with evidence-based medicine as both analyze data to detect illnesses, but the difference is that deep-learning technology performs better than humans,” said Anthony Paek, Co-Founder of Lunit.
Their latest breast cancer detection product is Lunit Insight for Mammography (Lunit MMG). In addition, they were named by CB Insights as one of the AI 100 startups transforming the healthcare industry.
The Korea MFDS (Ministry of Food and Drug Safety) approved Lunit’s AI solution for breast cancer. Therefore, it is now available for sale in Korea. It was co-developed with Yonsei Severance Hospital, Asan Medical Center, and Samsung Medical Center. In addition, Lunit provides an online demo for users to test the performance of its software.
Shinhan led Lunit’s series C round along with InterVest, Kakao Ventures, IMM Investment, and Lenovo Group’s Legend Capital. To date, Lunit has raised $135 million and will use its latest investment to accelerate the global sales of its AI software for chest and breast radiology. In addition, they will continue to drive their R&D efforts in oncology and pathology as they plan for their IPO in 2023.
Standigm a Korean AI Startup that uses AI technology for drug discovery and development. The startup has combined a strong combination of talent and technology to speed up the discovery of new medicines. Therefore, their team has experts in AI, chemistry, systems engineering, and systems biology. They aim to help drug discovery teams worldwide with challenges from target identification to novel compound discovery bypassing, modeling, and interpreting complex datasets.
They raised a total of $15 million from Kakao Ventures, Atinum Investment, DSC Investment, LB Investment, Wonik Investment Partners, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, and Mirae Asset Capital. The funds will go towards scaling its AI technology platform.
“We demonstrated in vitro and in vivo data of our repurposing drug candidates. This latest round from top investors and innovators in AI and biotechnology fields represents their confidence in our technology to innovate the drug discovery process in the pharmaceutical industry. We will create partnerships with leading healthcare organizations to accelerate this mission and bolster our pipelines,” said CEO of Standigm Jinhan Kim.
Furthermore, Standigm AI has a strong reputation in the pharmaceutical industry. Therefore, for 2022 they will look to create partnerships with leading healthcare organizations to grow their pipelines.
Oncocross is a Korean AI biotech startup that checks new medicine material adaptability with the existing medicines with its AI engine. They specialize in drug discovery and cancer drug development. Their AI Platform is called ONCO. It allows patients to get the best care possible and the correct medicine. In addition, it helps pharmaceutical companies increase drug development’s success rate at affordable prices and in less time. Furthermore, Oncocross got $14 million for its Series B investment. Investors included Hanvit Investment, SmileGate Investment, G N Tech Venture Investment, KDB Capital, Hana Financial Investment, Wooshin Venture Investment, NAU IB Captial, Magna Investment, ID Ventures, KB Securities, SM Sino Technology Investment, Vision Creator, and eBest Investment & Securities.
Korean Medical Startup 3billion provides an AI-based medical diagnostic service to diagnose rare diseases. 3billion offers direct-to-consumer genomic rare disease screening tests. Their machine learning-based automated variant interpretation system reduces the time and cost of the process. Furthermore, they also offer a solution that scans for DNA mutations and helps physicians diagnose rare diseases faster and more accurately. The process works like this. First, the customer takes a sample of their saliva sample and sends it to Macrogen, their parent company. Macrogen is then able to create the genomic data from the sample.
“We are going to expand clinical studies to thousands of rare patients and sophisticate our variant interpretation system by using large-scale rare genome data from the studies,” said the CEO of 3billion, Changwon Keum.
3billion has raised over $10 million to date.
3billion won the ASEAN- Korea Scale-up contest at Try Everything Korea. They won the Next Unicorn award. As the winner, 3billion will join the final round of eXtreme Challange (XTC), the world’s largest startup contest for entrepreneurs looking to tackle global challenges. The XTC contest was held in France in 2021.
Korean AI Biotech startup Deep Bio Inc. is focused on improving reliability and decreasing the turnaround time for medical diagnoses. Therefore, they collaborate with medical professionals in integrating AI into existing clinical workflows to help them make better-informed decisions that will lead to the best patient outcome. Furthermore, Deep Bio has a team of medical experts and engineers to curate ideal datasets.
Their AI goes through many review cycles to establish the highest performance standard. Furthermore, it is seamlessly integrated into existing LIMS. In addition, it can be hosted on their DeepDx platform. Their first product was the DeepDx Prostate. It uses deep learning to recognize and localize acinar adenocarcinoma of the prostate in scanned, H&E-stained histopathology slides.
Korean Medical AI-based software startup Neurophet created tES Lab 2.0, which automatically segments brain magnetic resonance (MR) into 107 regions within a minute. Therefore, the Neurophet tES Lab 2.0 is a complete transcranial electrical stimulation simulation software. In addition, It allows users to calculate and visualize brain stimulation effects. This is based on the individual’s brain structure and stimulus conditions.
Furthermore, Neurophet secured $5 million in series A funding in late 2019.
Korean AI BioTech startup Tomocube creates real-time 3D imaging products for optical solutions and developed a diagnosis program that combines 3D holographic microscopy and AI technology. Furthermore, their platform allows researchers to measure nanoscale, real-time, dynamic images of individual living cells without sample preparation. Their main product, a microscope called HT-1, measures 3D refractive index tomograms of live cells and tissues. Therefore, this allows for high-resolution 3D refractive index tomograms of cells. This is important in showing the development of apoptotic features in early Parkinson’s disease (PD) progression. Therefore, this technology allows researchers to conduct long-term studies without fearing photobleaching and phototoxicity impacting their results.
Tomocube has worked closely with the top technical university in Seoul, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). They are working together to develop the custom stitching software for the motorized stage.
The Tomocube HT2 holographic microscope is the world’s first to combine holography and 3D imaging into one unit. In addition, It can capture high-resolution 3D optical diffraction tomography and 3D images simultaneously.
“We, as the first mover in the 3D holographic image industry, feel a great sense of responsibility and burden to move ahead at the same time. But I believe we can and will grow even more to give benefits to the medical industry and patients by releasing innovative products,” said the CEO of Tomocube Hong Ki-hyun.
AIRS Medical is the creator of SwiftMR. SwiftMR is an AI MRI reconstruction software that can enhance images under various conditions. A typical MRI scan can last between 30-90 minutes. This is why patients are sometimes sedated, as it can be a very uncomfortable process. Many radiologists sacrifice image quality to make the process as quick as possible. AIRS Medical can enhance low-quality images using AI technology. The AI software communicates with the institution’s PAC (Picture Archiving and Communication System). SwiftMR is used in many institutions across South Korea and is gaining positive feedback from radiologists worldwide.
“We believe we can meaningfully reduce scan and wait times and ultimately, enable medical imaging services to be more accessible to people around the world,” said CEO of AIRS Medical Jingu Lee.
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