Interview with Kim Bong-joon, President of the IMBA Student Council (Vice President of HEM Pharma), Graduate School of B
- 경영대학
- Hit482
- 2021-11-22
“Pleasure, wisdom, study, and virtue lose their light without health" -Montaigne
We think it is happiness to gain wealth, honor, and status. But the key to such happiness lies in health. Health is the most important thing in human life, just as it seems to be useless if you lose your health after getting it all.
As life expectancy increases and people enter an aging society, people's interest in health is higher than ever. In particular, health care for the bodies of modern people who have deteriorated due to westernized eating habits and stress is becoming essential. Amid growing demand for healthier life and better healthcare services, we met with HEM Pharma and Vice President Kim Bong-joon, who are creating "healthy life values" through their own patented technologies.
Q. Please introduce yourself and the HEM you are working for.
Hello, I'm Kim Bong-joon, vice president of HEM Pharma, and COO (Chief Operating officer). And I'm President of the IMBA Student Council, Sungkyunkwan University Graduate School of Business. HEM Pharma, where I work, is a microbiome health care company that serves the value of a healthy life. HEM stands for Human Effective Microbes, and we want to contribute to a healthy and happy life for humans by developing treatments using beneficial microorganisms in the intestine and providing personalized healthcare solutions with our own patented technology that reproduces intestinal environment. I am in charge of the overall operation of the company, including human resource management, organizational culture, and system construction, and I am in charge of promoting new microbiome projects while serving as the head of the future strategy division.
Q. What research (technology) will represent HEM?
We are discovering various therapeutic candidate microorganisms based on microbiome research. The "HEM 20-01" strain, which is recently being developed as a treatment for depression, is gaining momentum in development, such as patent registration and registration as a new dietary ingredient (NDI) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and additional treatment pipelines are also secured.
It also holds a technology patent for its own Pharmaceutical Mata-Analytic Screening (PMAS) method. This is a platform technology that can quickly screen candidate materials such as probiotics and prebiotics that improve intestinal microbiome by establishing in vitro conditions that reproduce a person's intestinal environment. This technology will be used as a core technology that will lead the future healthcare market, such as rapid screening of candidate microorganisms and substances, as wells as development of personalized probiotics/prebiotics.
Q. What is microbiome, microbiome research (technology)?
Micorbiome is a term commonly referred to as microbiota, a microorganism that lives in the human body and symbiosis, genes of microorganisms, and metabolites produced by microorganisms. Microbiome research is actively being conducted around the world as it can be used to develop new drugs, develop new treatments, develop diagnostic technologies to predict disease risk, and develop health functional foods, food, and cosmetics through research on microorganisms that lived and coexist in the human body.
Q. What is your main business based on PMAS technology?
The focus is on a treatment business that quickly discovers and develops various microbiome treatment candidates as treatments and a healthcare business that categorizes individual intestinal environments to provide health functional foods such as personalized probiotics suitable for each type.
Currently, we are promoting domestic and overseas B2B business cooperation through MOU and Strategic Investment (SI) with partners such as Amway Global and Amore Pacific
To promote this project, the GMP raw material drug production facility for microbiome production was completed, approved as a health functional food GMP plant as the first stage, and Lab Information Management System (LIMS), an integrated microbiome sample and treatment candidate microorganisms, was established.
Q. From what I hear, I think it's a fast-growing startup. I heard that not only business cooperation with companies, but also the company's workforce increased significantly in a short period of time. What do you think is the growth engine of the company?
Due to the nature of bio-pharmaceutical start-ups, it is important to secure competitive independent technologies and microorganisms for treatment candidates. I think the company's growth has accelerated as researchers with high expertise participated and secured core technologies and microorganisms of excellent characteristics under the high vision of "serving the healthy life value of mankind" by founder and world-renowned microbiome professor Wilhelm Holzapfel (CTO), and Dr. Joseph, a microbiome expert who is the founder and CEO.
Q. I'm curious about your career before HEM.
Before joining the company, I worked at CJ CheilJedang for about 18 years. In the former workplace, I proposed a new business to discover and commercialize useful microorganisms of traditional Korean fermented foods and oversaw research and development until commercialization, and in recognition of the world's first improvement in skin itching caused by atopic dermatitis, it launched "BYO Skin Lactobacillus CJLP133" in 2013, and won the grand prize and IR52 Jangyeongsil Award at the 2015 Agriculture, Food and Technology Awards. Since then, I have discovered a number of new business items and derived results while serving as the head of the useful microbial center, which serves as a useful microbial discovery and technology control tower for each business, including food, bio, and biological resources.
Q. What was the most memorable moment during the long time you contemplated and studied "the value of a healthy life"?
At the time of research to develop anti-atopy efficacy strains, my three-year-old son had severe atopic dermatitis, so he couldn't sleep well, scratched, bled every day, and even if he used medicine, his symptoms could not be improved, so I suffered a lot. Among the lactobacillus under development, lactic acid bacteria that were found to relieve atopic symptoms and consumed the prepared ingredients for edible use to my child, then in about 10 days, the itching of the skin disappeared, slept well, and had a clear effect afterwards, so I was happy and proud as a father.
Q. What made you enter Sungkyunkwan University (especially IMBA, Graduated School of Business)?
As a science major, I joined the company without basic management skills, reviewed business strategies, and collaborated with the marketing department to study every time and learn what direction was right empirically. However, I had a lot of questions about the theoretical part, and I thought a lot that I wanted to think about it together while communicating with people with various experiences. So I went to graduate school.
Q. I think you have so much affection for your activities that you are the president of the student council. Are you satisfied with "Second School Life" at Sungkyunkwan University's IMBA?
I think Sungkyunkwan University's Graduated School of Business IMBA is a place that solves the needs that I thought of. You can select and take subjects in various fields that you are curious about, and self-learning is also possible through auditing for other subjects. IMBA has self-government activity groups run by students, such as the Student Association, Overseas Alumni Association, and 3 clubs and 5 research groups. There are colokiums, seminars, activities, and small groups held together or individually by the student council, each club, and research group, and active communication and information exchange about the category are held offline and each group chat room. Through overseas alumni association, exchanges with alumni in various countries and unity and communication for each rider are also active. In my case, since the first semester, I have joined 5 clubs/research groups, and now all 8 of them. Although I am busy, I am very satisfied because I learn a lot from interacting with my fellow students, so I am happily living my 'second school life'.
Source : [SKKUZine] Person Focus (https://webzine.skku.edu/skkuzine/section/people.do)