Dr. So-Yeon Kang

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80 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Dr. So-Yeon Kang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · China's booming biotech, from a brain implant to drug discovery · 13 Jul 2026 podcast

Thank you for having me.

That's a great question.

And China's rise in biotechnology is not just a random or overnight event.

It's the sort of result of more than a decade of coordinated investment in science, research, regulation, and biotechnology industry.

And I think it's really a two-part story.

First is that the way that pharmaceutical companies develop drugs has changed a lot.

So our traditional image of big pharma companies is like Pfizer, like a higher army of PhDs from biology or chemistry PhD and run their own lab, discover drugs and patent them, develop the drugs and commercialize them, right?

So like a one-stop shop, you know, model, but it changed a lot.

And they now, of course, do have their own laboratories, but also to search for the neurotrace candidates,

So they send these people to China, Singapore, South Korea to find the promising drug candidates.

And second part is, again, China's investment in this drug industry and the transformation of their ecosystem toward more innovation from manufacturing.

Right.

So China is known for its sort of effectory of the world concept, right?

So the primary supplier of generic drugs.

But now they are really doing well in early stage drug development.

When you say early stage drug development, it means that it includes the early stage drug discovery and also the preclinical research and the phase one and phase two clinical trials.

That's another important area that we need to explore and investigate further.

But what we hear a lot is about their speed and cost.

So startup companies, as you can imagine, like in a small startup companies, they run on the very limited funding that they raised from venture capital firms.

So they have limited time and limited amount of money, for example, like $20 million for 20 months, something like that.

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