Jungwon Woo, MedPacto CEO, discusses translating innovative cancer research into clinical development, with a focus on TGF-beta and tumour microenvironment targeting. She highlights MP010’s potential, early clinical progress and partnership opportunities, while advocating faster, substantive global co-development. Woo also stresses Korea’s scientific strengths, development expertise, open innovation, strong talent and the importance of translating research into medicines that reach patients.
You joined MedPacto as an executive around two and a half years ago. What mandate were you given when you took the role?
Our founder, Dr. Seong-jin Kim, is a highly respected scientist who spent more than 20 years at the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute building a career rooted in cancer research. His vision has always been to develop innovative, science-driven pipelines around novel targets, and that discovery-led approach remains central to MedPacto’s identity. At the same time, he recognised that scientific discovery is only one part of the equation: promising preclinical results must ultimately translate into meaningful proof of concept in humans.
He valued my experience across both clinical and business development. My role has been to help move our research pipeline through the clinic and toward commercialisation, recognising that manufacturing, and regulatory strategy matter just as much to a drug’s competitiveness as the clinical data itself. Ultimately, my responsibility is to help ensure our lead candidates are developed effectively, demonstrate their value in the clinic, and become attractive assets for global partners.
How would you characterise the broader drug development culture in Korea, particularly around founder-led biotechs like MedPacto?
A great deal of interesting, innovative discovery research in Korea is led by scientists, often professors, and global interests in Korean biotech grew over the years. However, securing financial support is still very competitive and quite difficult. Since no single person can cover every phase of drug development alone. I think of it as growing the overall pie: even if your own share ends up smaller, it can be worth more than trying to keep the whole, smaller pie to yourself.
A biotech cannot sustain many pipelines at once unless it has built a platform with broad applicability, in which case licensing that platform out becomes the sensible path – once you commit to clinical development, the financial burden of process development, toxicology, and clinical-grade manufacturing becomes substantial. The Korean government does excellent work here, but it does not cover the full cost; companies still need to invest a significant portion themselves. Korea’s real strength right now is active, innovative discovery research, and that expertise, along with international networking, keeps improving.
What I would hope for is that global pharmaceutical companies conduct more generous due diligence on Korean assets and, where they see genuine potential, pursue real collaboration including financial support for an early phase development, We are here to develop good drugs for patients, and what we need are true co-developers, not partnerships that provide free drug supply but offer little substance for total development cost.
Early-phase trial strategy seems to differ here from the later-phase work Korean investigators are typically known for. Can you say more about that?
Many well-known Korean physicians are already deeply involved in global pharmaceutical companies’ clinical trials, so they understand the landscape well, but that involvement tends to concentrate in late stage development such as Phase III, where a drug’s value is being confirmed rather than proven from scratch. I hope these experienced PI’s input is increased in early-phase, work, and Korean companies can establish its clinical value as quickly as possible. Demonstrating a genuine success story, and moving as quickly as possible with the full range of expertise drug development requires, matters more.
Turning to the science itself, how would you describe MedPacto, as a platform company or an asset-focused one, and what is the underlying technology?
Dr Kim spent many years at the US National Cancer Institute working with pioneers of TGF-beta biology, and he brings decades of expertise in this signalling pathway. It was a clear, major target for him, given how heavily tumours exploit it, though TGF-beta itself is double-edged, playing an important role in normal physiological homeostasis too. Our company began with vactosertib, an oral small molecule that systemically blocks TGF-beta signalling; conveniently administered and reasonably safe, we found it particularly powerful in blood cancers and cell therapy settings, and we are now studying it in osteosarcoma, where TGF-beta signalling plays a role across multiple stages of disease pathology.
There remain important cancers where systemic inhibition genuinely matters, but the more we studied this, the more we understood just how difficult it is to dismantle the tumour microenvironment that allows a tumour to establish and grow within its host.
Rather than directly targeting tumour cells, MP010 is designed to target components of the tumour microenvironment. We are targeting the tumour microenvironment, which is a meaningful distinction, since tumours are often protected by, and effectively hidden behind, that physical barrier. Many drugs target the tumour directly, but our approach is aimed at modulating the fibrotic extracellular-matrix barrier the tumour builds around itself and destroy it– the defining difference in our current asset, MP010.
Does that positioning suggest this would not be a first-line treatment, at least initially? How do you see it fitting alongside the standard of care?
Our primary target remains TGF-beta itself, but our real objective is neutralising the harm it does around and within the tumour, which is why our trap is designed to reach the tumour area and clear it there directly. Every new drug still needs to demonstrate potential efficacy as a monotherapy first, so we will likely run an all-comers solid tumour study initially to establish safety across a defined dose range, before selecting the cancer types best suited to further development. Historically that kind of early study enrolled only heavily pretreated, later-line patients, but regulators, including the FDA, have become considerably more open to different approaches as combination therapy has become the default strategy in oncology.
Immunomodulating drugs like ours, which work by modulating the tumour microenvironment rather than acting as direct cytotoxic chemotherapy, can often benefit patients earlier in their treatment course, before their immune system has been heavily compromised by prior lines of therapy. We increasingly see large companies, once they have proven a single agent’s potential, move directly toward first-line settings. The advantage there is that you are simply adding your drug onto the existing standard of care, so the comparison becomes standard of care alone versus standard of care plus your drug, rather than head-to-head against it. For a modality like ours, which typically does not add significantly to chemotherapy-related toxicity, that kind of addition is generally well tolerated.
Given the nature of our pipeline, I believe that path is ultimately more promising. We will still pursue human proof of concept and monotherapy safety data as quickly as possible, but once that foundation is established, we intend to explore combination approaches in earlier treatment lines rather than later ones.
Indication selection comes first, followed by patient selection, since this is fundamentally a biomarker-driven, precision-medicine approach. That said, while we understand conceptually which biomarkers our drug’s design should relate to, clinical reality is more complex, so we cannot apply a biomarker strategy from the very start of a trial. We need to gather more data first, confirm our concept is working, and only then apply biomarker-based selection to a more targeted patient subset.
Where does your lead asset, MP010, currently sit in development?
MP010 is being supported by a Korea Drug Development Fund grant and is in the later stages of preparing its investigational new drug package; we expect to submit that application this year and hope to begin recruiting patients into Phase I early next year.
Your development plans reference both the US FDA and Korea. Have you already run trials in the US?
We have experience operating clinical sites in the US as part of our global development strategy and to build familiarity with the US regulatory and clinical environment. At the same time, Korea offers significant advantages for selected early-stage studies in terms of clinical quality, execution speed, and cost efficiency.
Are you planning to build MP010 out as a broader platform, or stay tightly asset-focused through to Phase II and a potential exit?
I try to remain flexible about whatever best facilitates our pipeline’s development. For now, since establishing global recognition for our drug matters most, I would prefer to secure a global partner and pursue early licensing, both to learn from that process and to move it forward as quickly as possible. TGF-beta inhibition has genuinely broad applicability, given how central that pathway is across most cancers, but every combination and every indication requires its own clinical development programme, and we cannot pursue all of them simultaneously. Initially, we would develop the lead indication for ourselves but ideally, once we are not financially constrained and have a genuine co-development relationship, we can expand into further indications. MP010 also retains real potential as a platform in its own right, since multispecific antibodies and biologics are increasingly significant in oncology, and our molecule could plausibly be paired with an antibody and built into a bispecific format.
Many drug developers are pursuing pembrolizumab-based combinations, and MSD has shown a willingness to extend its franchise this way. Given your previous experience with MSD, how risky is that strategy when so many companies are pursuing similar approaches?
MSD clearly still regards pembrolizumab as central to its strategy. Given how firmly combination therapy has become the standard approach in oncology, the company remains keen to find partners that can help secure patents on new regimens, effectively extending its franchise through lifecycle management. Even as anti-PD-1 combined with anti-VEGF bispecifics have started to look like potential successors to anti-PD-1 alone, three Chinese companies recently signed major deals with US partners involving substantial upfront payments and multi-billion-dollar total values, one of which was with Merck itself – evidence of how much continued importance the industry places on anti-PD-1 therapy.
Combination remains a viable path for us, and our drug can also be fused directly with a PD-1 antibody. For now, we see real value in keeping MP010 available as more flexible platform technology, capable of delivering TGF-beta trapping in a targeted way to the tumour microenvironment rather than systemically.
You mentioned MP010 could potentially be paired with an antibody-drug conjugate too. Given the number of ADC programmes emerging from Japan and China, are you exploring that space as well?
MP010 can be used as a standalone therapy, but it can also be combined or fused to essentially any antibody, including in a multispecific format. I think of antibody-drug conjugates as more targeted chemotherapy, reducing adverse events while delivering cytotoxic payload more precisely. But these molecules are considerably larger than conventional chemotherapy, so if a tumour is surrounded by a particularly thick barrier, penetration can fall short of what companies hope for. MP010 is designed to loosen that barrier and improve delivery, which is why a number of ADC developers have expressed genuine interest in combination work with us, recognising that their own programmes also need pairing with something else to reach full effectiveness.
Looking to your next catalysts, are you currently focused on partnering with a major pharmaceutical company, or on securing bridge financing to continue development independently? What does the ideal scenario look like for MedPacto?
For vactosertib, a number of companies continue to reach out about potential collaboration, and we remain responsive while advancing our osteosarcoma programme in parallel. For MP010, even without pursuing a multispecific or platform format yet, we see real inherent value in the asset, though many people remain sceptical of macromolecular TGF-beta trap development generally, given how many previous programmes in this space have failed. We believe those failures largely came down to inadequate, systemic delivery to cancer patients, and demonstrating we can solve that problem is precisely our current focus.
We have attended BIO US, JP Morgan’s healthcare conference, and previously BIO Europe, and while we have seen considerable interest, most companies want Phase I proof-of-concept data first. That is exactly where our focus lies. In the meantime, we continue meeting interested companies and keeping them updated; dose escalation is going well, and we are seeing encouraging early signals.
We expect to submit our Investigator-Initiated Trial documentation, with dosing beginning next year. We expect to complete at least a Phase Ib study to confirm safety and generate meaningful early signal – such as high disease control rate, meaning patients whose disease is stable or responding to treatment, even though these will inevitably be very late-stage solid tumour patients. That signal, together with confirmed safety, is what we are looking for to validate the drug’s potential. We have the funding in place to complete that work, drawing on Korea Drug Development Fund support, continued eligibility for further government grants, and prior fundraising completed before I joined, which together gives us sufficient cash to complete the Phase Ib study.
To close, what leadership factors are you focused on to keep the team on track, and how would you characterise the quality of biotech talent in Korea more broadly?
The human factor matters enormously here. I do not think Korea can realistically outpace China on speed alone, simply given the difference in population and the volume of trial-and-error that scale allows; with a considerably smaller population, achieving the same amount of iterative learning inevitably takes longer. Because of that, quality becomes the decisive factor in our research and development. Before I joined, MedPacto was more purely science-oriented; since joining, I have placed much greater emphasis on development, because that is what makes good science genuinely useful. Excellent research that only produces a good paper, without translating into an actual drug, does not fulfil our purpose – people often talk about going “from bench to bedside,” and that translation is exactly what we are here to achieve.
My leadership approach comes down to consistent communication and leading by example: emphasising the same priorities, and making sure my own decisions and behaviour reflect the goals I talk about, since that resonates far more powerfully than words alone. Our team increasingly thinks in terms of development-oriented research rather than pure academic research. Building genuine consensus around development-supporting research matters greatly to me. Our research team is excellent at this, and strong in-house animal facilities significantly shorten the time needed to generate crucial nonclinical data – a real advantage for MedPacto; our team can, for instance, perform complex orthotopic mouse cancer surgeries very efficiently.
Maintaining quality without losing time also requires real openness: open innovation and outsourcing matter enormously, since no single company can hold world-class expertise in every relevant area internally. I actively encourage bringing in outside consultants where it helps, since it both accelerates our work and feeds back into raising our own team’s capability. The key is staying open, knowing your genuine strengths as well as your gaps, and addressing those gaps either by training the existing team or by recruiting the right people.
What would be your closing message to potential Big Pharma partners?
Larger companies are generally most interested in genuine novelty and innovation. TGF-beta itself might sound like a well-established target given how long it has been studied, but I would ask them to look closely at how we have designed our molecule and judge the innovation in that design. Where partners can offer guidance that shortens our path to proof of concept and speeds up their own decision-making, we are genuinely open to that.
Ultimately, MedPacto has always been driven by genuinely innovative discovery research, and that investment of time speaks for itself; I would hope any prospective co-development partner focuses on the real uniqueness of our molecular design.
