Chapter 93: Cellicure (4)

Gu Sung-Woo, the Commissioner of the Korean Intellectual Property Office, was looking over the patent applications that came in this morning. These patents, which had been filed through the International Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), were documents that had come for the final approval stamp.

The Patent Cooperation Treaty was the standard model of international patents that pursued the protection of patents regarding inventions in more than one hundred fifty countries with an international patent treaty.

The patents that Lee Hae-Won spent several nights filing was now Goo Sung-Woo’s problem. A large pile of documents came into his office in a small cart.

“What is this?” he asked with wide eyes.

“It’s CEO Ryu’s from A-Bio.”

Goo Sung-Woo covered his face with his hands after he heard the employee, who was moving the documents into his office. He figured out what this was after he heard that it was Young-Joon’s. This was well-known from the examination stage. They were all animal disease treatments, and there were one hundred twenty-two patents of them. The patent attorney had grouped it by disease when writing the statement instead of separating them into individual ones, but there were still thirty-two. Additionally, there were about four hundred pages for each patent statement written for every group.

“Is the attorney who filed these still alive?” asked Goo Sung-Woo as he stacked the documents on his desk.

“I heard that the attorney went into Ryu Young-Joon’s company as the in-house patent attorney.”

“They wrote this, and they’re still working for him?”

“Yes.”

“Is it like Stockholm Syndrome or something?”

“I don’t know. But the examiner used all his time off after this and disappeared.”

“...”

“Anyways, these are all the documents about the one hundred twenty-two new drugs. They have all been approved.”

“I didn't think they would actually all get approved. I think I’ll get a cramp in my arm just from stamping it.”

“The patent examiners from other countries probably put their blood, sweat, and tears into this.”

“Phew. What can you do? It came in for priority review.”

Starting with the first drug, Goo Sung-Woo began looking over them one by one.

* * *

The first group of livestock infectious diseases included rinderpest, hoof-and-mouth disease, swine fever, highly pathogenic avian influenza, vesicular stomatitis, Valley fever, Bluetongue, and sheep pox. The second group of diseases included tuberculosis, Aujeszky’s disease, equine infectious anemia, nausea, rabies, chronic wasting disease, anaplasma, and Duck virus hepatitis. The third group of diseases included bovine ephemeral fever, akabane disease, avian mycoplasmosis, porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, porcine epidemic diarrhea, avian encephalomyelitis, Marek’s disease, and infectious bursal disease. It also included pet diseases for dogs and cats like the parvovirus infections and leptospirosis,

Patents for one hundred twenty-two drugs for a total of thirty-two groups of diseases were approved. There were basically three drugs for one disease, and there were two reasons for this. The first was to completely prevent competitive drugs from being discovered later and patented, and the second was to use another drug as a backup in case one drug does not work due to animal specificity.

These incredible drugs were examined from all over the world and approved.

[Ryu Young-Joon publishes patents for one hundred twenty-two types of animal diseases.]

[A-Bio CEO Ryu Young-Joon secures one hundred twenty-two animal drug patents personally.]

[How will all these drugs transform the livestock market and the pet industry?]

The news articles that were coming up one after another were more provocative than usual.

Professor Shin Jung-Ju appeared on the radio for the first time in a while.

—CEO Ryu had commissioned these experiments to famous, mid-sized companies called Reaction Chemistry and Cell Bio. He spent over a million won on commission fees and patent publishing. And he succeeded in all of them.

—Is this possible? How can an individual do something like this just with experiment agencies?

The interviewer asked.

—Usually, they can’t.

—Some say that CEO Ryu may have registered personal patents by stealing internal data from A-Gen.

—Haha, conspiracy theories like that are coming out because he succeeded in publishing an unbelievable amount of patents, but they will disappear soon. It is because A-Gen has never studied animal diseases before. No matter how talented the thief is, how could they steal something that doesn’t exist?

—Of course. But how did CEO Ryu do it?

—No one knows. But there is something more surprising. It’s that CEO RYu requested Reaction Chemistry to design a total of one hundred twenty-two drug candidates, and the number of animal experiments commissioned to Cell Bio was one hundred twenty-two. What do you think this means?

—What does it mean?

—It means that CEO Ryu already knew all the results when synthesizing the new drug candidates, whether the drug cured avian influenza in chickens, cholera in pigs. He knew this for all one hundred twenty-two.

—Oh!

The interviewer exclaimed like they realized what she meant.

—I understand what you are saying, Professor. You’re saying that you don’t know what disease in what animal it cures even if you synthesize the drug since it’s not like the information about the disease is written in the molecular formula or something, right? And if you don’t know that, you need to do much more than one hundred twenty-two animal experiments because you need to test one candidate on various animals and diseases?

—That’s exactly right. It’s shocking that he requested the synthesis of exactly one hundred twenty-two candidate drugs. It means that he only requested that many because he was confident that the structure of the designed molecule would be effective. Usually, people synthesize around a thousand different molecules and do experiments to pick out the ones that are effective.

—Wow... But CEO Ryu synthesized one hundred twenty-two drugs, only did one hundred twenty-two experiments, and succeeded in publishing patents for all of them?

—Now can you see how unbelievable this work is?

—... Professor Shin, do you think CEO Ryu actually knows that the new drugs and treatments he is developing for human diseases right now are going to be successful? Do we need a clinical trial?

—As an individual, I would honestly believe him if he said that he was confident in human diseases as well given his accuracy. But I shouldn’t believe him as a scientist since there are rules about the steps to developing a drug, and they are there to protect everyone.

Shin Jung-Ju said.

—I see.

—But from this point on, it’s clear that the clinical trials of new drugs developed by CEO Ryu will gain a lot of credibility. He did succeed in every clinical trial he conducted before this, but this is a completely different magnitude than before in terms of quantity.

—It’s truly fascinating. How did CEO Ryu do this?

—No clue. Maybe he has an answer key to biology? Hahaha.

Young-Joon was listening to the radio in his car.

—I guess Professor Shin Jung-Ju was right.

Rosaline said playfully.

‘You’re right.’

—Soon, the world will know about me.

‘You want to be?’

—No. What if you get captured by the U.S. army and experimented on?

‘Where did you hear that from?’

—I saw a few movies while I was searching through your memories. But there are times when I am really worried. I can fight off some sloppy gangsters, but I won’t be able to stop an attack like a machine gun because of the fitness limit.

‘Don’t worry. That’s why I travel with these security guards right here, right?’

Young-Joon glanced at Kim Chul-Kwon, the head of the security team, who was sitting beside him with his arms crossed. He was muscular like a lowland gorilla, and his suit looked like it was going to explode from being so tight.

—Do security guards usually look like this? All his muscle fibers are enlarged to their limit.

‘Really?’

—I have never seen someone with such a trained body.

‘I guess Park Joo-Hyuk introduced me to the right guy.’

Ring!

Yoo Song-Mi’s phone rang from the passenger’s seat. She took the call, then handed it to Young-Joon.

“It’s Mr. Mckinney.”

Young-Joon took the phone.

—The news and media is going crazy in the United States. I keep getting messages from people in livestock associations about this.

“Really?”

—Should I read some of them to you? Um... From Fox News this morning, they said, “The experimental data released from Ryu Young-Joon’s patented treatments showed that the designed experiments were strictly controlled like academic papers, and they are expected to have a great impact on the actual treatment of animal diseases. The U.S. livestock industry is worth one million dollars; being able to save them from livestock epidemics, which can cause considerable damage to the industry, is expected to bring tremendous benefits not just in bioethics, but economically as well.”

Mckinney read the news report to Young-Joon.

“It feels good to be complimented.’

—How is the diagnostic kit going? We can do this with certainty only if we have that.

“We are working hard to develop it. We’ve also found a way to lower the unit price as well,” Young-Joon said.

—I see. Mr. Ryu, when will you begin production?

“I am on my way to meet the CEO of A-Gen to discuss that,” he replied.

* * *

Young-Joon, who arrived at A-Gen, was alone with Yoon Dae-Sung.

“I knew that you were smart and you made good drugs, but I didn’t know that you filed one hundred twenty-two patents without A-Gen knowing,” Yoon Dae-Sung said.

“A-Gen had the idea, but didn’t work on animal disease treatments.”

“Those patents. They’re not A-Bio’s or A-Gen’s, but your own, right?”

“Yes.”

Yoon Dae-Sung put his hand on his head like this was trouble.

“Are you here to sell that to me?”

“You also know how much money these patents will generate. They won’t just be produced at A-Gen, but pharma companies all over the world that are in the livestock industry will want to pay royalties and make the drug.”

“Of course, especially companies like Conson & Colson. They will do it since the United States is one of the countries with a powerful livestock industry.”

“Yes. But a patent is only a patent. It’s another story from commercialization. You know that, right?”

“...”

Yoon Dae-Sung understood what Young-Joon was trying to say. He was trying to make a deal with commercialization while he kept the patent.

“I can make A-Gen the first to succeed at commercialization out of any company,” Young-Joon said. “The one hundred twenty-two drugs that were registered were all manufactured on the laboratory scale. They only make like five or ten milligrams. They were produced in a very rigorous process and were tested with a very pure formulation. But it’s not used like that in real industries. Everything changes when you manufacture a drug on a factory scale.”

“Yes.”

Making a drug in a lab and manufacturing a drug in a factory was completely different. Let’s say that it cost one million won to produce one dose of the drug in a lab. It couldn’t be produced like that because the unit price was too expensive. The drug would be sold for over two million won including the distribution fee and profit margin in pharmacies, so who would buy something like that?

As such, the process of commercialization was an essential adjustment process that reduced the cost of production for factory manufacturing. In this process, everything changed, like the reaction buffer, the boiling equipment and column. Optimizing this was also a process of research and development.

“As I am the developer of the one hundred twenty-two drugs, I also know how to make it into a factory scale.”

“And you are going to hand that over to A-Gen?”

“Yes, because I am a director of A-Gen. It’s important to grow our company, right? We have to start producing before everyone else.”

“What do you want for it? Do you want the next CTO position when Nicholas’ term is over and it becomes vacant?”

“I will get that position even if you don’t want me to,” Young-Joon said.

“...”

“The shareholders will support me a lot if I reveal that I have established all the commercialization methods and are going to supply them to A-Gen for free. It will be difficult for the CTO to hand over the position to someone else after his term ends in that atmosphere.”

“Then what do you want?”

Yoon Dae-Sung gulped. He felt like Young-Joon was going to ask him to give up his seat. Right now, the shareholders were absolutely on Young-Joon’s side. Yoon Dae-Sung had no choice but to accept it, even if Young-Joon was asking for too much, since his management abilities would be seriously questioned if he declined sloppily and the commercialization methods went to Conson & Colson. And in Young-Joon’s perspective, it didn’t matter who made the product as he would be the one making money.

Yoon Dae-Sung had been dragged along by Young-Joon several times, but he could never stop him, even if he knew. He couldn’t even imagine what it is Young-Joon wanted

“Is it shares?”

Young-Joon smiled as he saw Yoon Dae-Sung’s tense face.

“Sir, you don’t have to be so tense. I have no intention of asking for too much.”