Chapter 25: The First Author (3)

Division Manager Ji Kwang-Man stared at Young-Joon in thought. His protruding eyes were extremely intense and made Young-Joon slightly uncomfortable. He looked like a thousand-old toad that was staring at its prey before it was about to eat it.

But weirdly, Ji Kwang-Man’s facial expression did not seem hostile; it just looked like he was running calculations in his head. He didn’t say anything, but Young-Joon could see that he was considering every possible scenario and calculating the gains and losses of each one.

Young-Joon felt his hands sweat a little. He was a little nervous as Ji Kwang-Man was staying silent for a while, but he held his breath and waited cautiously.

“Interesting.” Ji Kwang-Man opened his mouth. “It’s an interesting story. You’re the most fascinating person I’ve met recently, Doctor Ryu.”

Young-Joon stayed silent.

“But Doctor Ryu, do I look like someone who would be flustered because a mere scientist is threatening to go to Pfizer?”

“I don’t know. But what I can tell is that you don’t seem like a person to judge someone entirely on their rank.”

Ji Kwang-Man chuckled.

“You’re not backing down even a little bit, are you? You definitely have the guts to curse at Director Kim... but you know you can only do things like that if you have the skills to back you up, right? If you don’t, it’s nothing but acting out.”

“Of course,” Young-Joon replied.

“How are you going to prove that you’re talented? I know that you presented great results at the seminar. But your past performance does not matter when we are talking about your next performance, right?”

“I will treat nerve damage with iPSCs. I will successfully treat it in animal experiments, so please prepare a clinical trial for it.”

“How long do you need?”

“A month should be enough.”

“Doctor Ryu, I majored in business, but I also studied biology on the side. I may not know how to do experiments, but I know as much theory as a newbie scientist. I also know how monumental your iPSC technology is, and I also know that it’s in its early stages. But you’re saying that you’re going to finish pre-clinical trial experiments in just a month?”

𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

“I can do it.”

“It’s something that other scientists couldn’t do, even if they were given decades. You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

“...Hm.”

Ji Kwang-Man rose from his seat and walked over to the window. He crossed his arms and looked out the window in thought.

“Doctor Ryu, I am a businessman, so I only think about profit. No matter what it is, if I consider the gains and losses and I can profit from it, I’ll do it. Whether it be giving an associate manager-level employee a right to the final approval of a huge budget or giving an individual ten percent of a huge patent.”

“...”

“But I’m not sure whether it will be a gain for the company to give you such powers, Doctor Ryu.”

Ji Kwang-Man turned his head and glared at Young-Joon.

“You can finish pre-clinical trial experiments for treating nerve damage with iPSCs in a month? If you’re that talented, why are you still at our company? If it were me, I would start my own business. You would earn more money that way and be treated better.”

“Even if I did, all I would be able to make would be trivial drugs. The only place that has the infrastructure to grow artificial organs with iPSCs and differentiate them into new tissue is this place. And that’s the kind of research I want to do.”

“Is that all?”

“It is. There are countless patients who are living a hard life with irreversible damage in their bodies. I want to develop iPSCs and treat people like that.”

“I can’t really understand people like you, Doctor Ryu. You probably hate the company after fighting with Director Kim Hyun-Taek like that, but the only reason you’re staying is because you want to study iPSCs, and the only place that has the infrastructure is here?”

“That’s correct.”

“Are you saying it’s just because of your pure passion for developing new drugs?”

“Do you know the reason why I fought against Director Kim and got demoted?”

Ji Kwang-Man closed his eyes.

“I do.”

It all happened after A-Gen destroyed a superior liver cancer drug that Celligener developed. After knowing about it, Young-Joon exploded in anger, saying that it was against research ethics, and he ended up cursing Kim Hyun-Taek in his face and fighting him.

‘So, what kind of person is Ryu Young-Joon?’

If Young-Joon thought politically, even just a little bit, he wouldn’t have been able to go against a person of power like Kim Hyun-Taek. That was an accident that happened because Young-Joon was a scientist who was truly pure and ethical, and could not calculate his gains and losses.

That was what Yoon Bo-Hyun reported as well; Young-Joon was an oddball genius who was crazy about science and research ethics.

If Young-Joon started his own business with his talent, he would make a lot of small drugs and get rich; he would live out the rest of his life loaded with money. But he was saying that the reason he was staying at A-Gen was because he wanted to develop iPSCs into a treatment.

If snakes like Gil Hyung-Joon said anything like that, he would have stopped them there. He wouldn’t have believed them since it would be dangerous for someone who had the power to control a huge budget like that to go against management.

‘But what precedents has this young man shown?’

“...”

Ji Kwang-Man opened his eyes.

“Alright. I will give you one month.”

‘Whatever. I’ll play his game and I’ll watch him a little longer.’

“Complete your animal model experiments successfully and bring me the results in a month. In the meantime, I’ll put this as a provisional application, and I will leave the status of this contract as pending, too.”

“Please assure me that you will proceed as is if I succeed.”

“If you succeed, I will approve of this patent application request and your contract. I give you my word. And one more thing.” Ji Kwang-Man added, “I will give the Stem Cells Department the same assignment. Please share the iPSC technology with them. I will not interfere with whatever disease model you treat with it. You and the Stem Cell Department can have different results.”

“The Stem Cells Department... Like you said, it is not easy to successfully treat a disease in an animal model in a month. I do not want to put any pressure on that department.”

“I am not going to punish them or anything if they are unable to do it. But to really prove that you are more exceptional than other scientists and that you are valuable enough for us to give you almost ninety percent of the shares of a patent, we need a comparison group, do we not?”

“... Alright.”

Young-Joon smiled slightly when Ji Kwang-Man mentioned a comparison group. It was a scientific term that referred to a separate sample that was only treated with the competitive drug when trying to prove a candidate drug’s effectiveness.

Division Manager Ji Kwang-Man. There were countless rumors that he was the Mad Hound or that he was a gang member, but now that Young-Joon met him, he was just an extremely logical person. There were times when extremely rational and calculated judgements could paradoxically look monstrous or like a maniac.

That was the kind of person Ji Kwang-Man was; he was a sociopathic person who would do anything and everything for profit and success. There was a reason why people were afraid of him.

Young-Joon thought,

‘Ah, now that I think of it, I have someone worse than that in my head.’

Young-Joon remembered Rosaline, who calculated the breakeven point with human lives and suggested that they eradicate the flu by spreading the disease intentionally. Rosaline was a true lunatic—a psychopath on another level... It was weird, but Young-Joon felt a little reassured.

“Then I will see you in a month.”

Young-Joon bowed and left.

* * *

‘One month...’

Young-Joon had set the conditions himself, but he almost felt sorry for the Stem Cells Department. Even if he gave them the recipe to make induced pluripotent stem cells, it would take over a month just to recreate that. But to successfully treat an animal disease model...

‘If they could do that, none of the Stem Cell Department members would be there. They would be lab directors...’

But since they were competing now, he was going to give it everything he had and surpass them.

Young-Joon went to find Lead Scientist Bae Sun-Mi. She was looking at nude mouse model data on her computer.

“Lead Bae.”

When Young-Joon called her, she turned and looked at Young-Joon, startled.

“You’re looking at nude mice.”

“Haha, it’s not really related to what we do. You caught me fooling around.”

A little embarrassed, Bae Sun-Mi closed the browser on her computer.

Nude mice were a type of experiment rats that had no immune system. Additionally, they also had no fur, which gave them their name. They were usually used when studying immune responses.

Bae Sun-Mi was a scientist who used to work at the Experiment Animal Resource Center, and she usually performed animal experiments. She ended up here after having some conflict with her superiors about maternity leave and other things when she had her second child. But even when she was doing biosynthesis experiments here, she really missed animal experiments. Because of that, she sometimes looked through new animal models, or the animal experiment services that A-Gen and other companies sold as products.

“Do you think we could do animal experiments?” Young-Joon asked Bae Sun-Mi.

“In our department?”

“I think mouse experiments will be good.”

“Wow. Do you have something in mind?”

“I’m going to make optic nerves,” Young-Joon replied.

Shock painted Bae Sun-Mi's face; she couldn’t understand what Young-Joon was saying.

“Optic... nerves?”

“Yes.”

“The stuff that’s in the retina of your eye? The optic nerves that I know?”

“Yes.”

“You can make that with stem cells?”

“Stem cells can differentiate into all kinds of cells. Of course nerve cells are possible.”

To Bae Sun-Mi, it was like Young-Joon was saying, “A spaceship can go to outer space, and it can obviously go to Mars or Jupiter since it could fly in space. So, why don’t we have our next company barbecue in Jupiter?”

Of course iPSCs were incredible, but how could they make optic nerve cells with those? It was uncharted territory. It wasn’t even a joke since they knew nothing about it.

But there was a reason why Young-Joon set such a difficult target. This was the starting gun that was going to announce a new trend in medicine. He had to build his reputation worldwide and leave a huge impact. The target to reach for this was vision.

A few years ago, there was big news about a pharmaceutical company called Spark releasing a new drug called Luxterna. This drug was a type of gene therapy that acted on the retina. It used a virus to insert an artificially synthesized RPE65 gene in patients with genetic diseases that destroyed their RPE65 gene.

When it was inserted, patients went from complete blindness to having vision that allowed them to see the grayscale and contrast. It wasn’t perfect, but it drastically improved one’s quality of life. There was a huge difference in everyday life between only seeing pitch black and being able to see shapes and the grayscale.

The drug cost one million won per eye. It was extremely expensive, but people were lining up to do it. It was a little dramatic, but people probably wanted to sell their liver or part of their kidney to do it if they could.

That was how much humans relied on the sense of vision. And after Luxterna achieved tremendous greatness, a fascinating trend happened in the pharmaceutical industry: a gene therapy boom. The story of opening a blind man’s eye was incredibly impactful. The people who were against gene therapy, saying that its safety hadn’t been proven and could be dangerous, had lost their justification.

‘Dangerous or not, our child is about to die! Luxterna worked, too!’

The voices of the people against gene therapy were buried by the overwhelming voices of people looking for other gene therapies like Luxterna.

The atmosphere of pharmaceutical companies was completely turned upside down, and they could no longer suppress the development of gene therapies. Several pharmaceutical companies including A-Gen poured a tremendous amount of their budget into developing gene therapies, and governments also supported them with huge amounts of money. As a result, dozens of new drugs had entered clinical trials in just a few years.

It was the same for stem cells. What Young-Joon was doing was the first ever induced pluripotent stem cell therapy. He had to achieve greatness by having a huge impact on the world. He had to be at the center of attention by standing out in the medical field. He had to make Ji Kwang-Man, who was basically testing him, kneel and thank him with tears in his eyes. That would allow subsequent drugs using iPSCs to cruise through without difficulty.

“Optic nerve cells are much easier to achieve compared to things like the spine or brain. But it’s significant in that it can dramatically improve a patient’s quality of life,” Young-Joon said.

“Yeah sure, but shouldn’t we try easier...” Bae Sun-Mi mumbled doubtfully.

“It’s okay, we’ll be able to do it. Lead Bae, do you think we could get some mice models with degenerated retinas? End-stage.”

A mice model of end-stage degenerated retinas meant that the mice’s cells in the retina did not work at all; the mice were completely blind. Young-Joon was going to create new optic nerves for them. He was going to create a new sense—vision—in mice that would have never seen anything in their life.

Luxterna was a gene therapy that barely improved the state of a specific genetic condition on perfectly normal optic nerve cells. Even so, it caused huge ripples throughout the field. But what Young-Joon was doing was going to reconstruct completely destroyed optic nerve cells as a whole.

It was not just going to be a couple of mice opening their eyes; scientists and doctors worldwide would be opening their eyes to a new future of medicine.

“I’ll try to get them. No matter what.” Bae Sun-Mi answered with a firm voice.

“Thank you,” Young-Joon replied.