Kwunho Jeong, CEO of JNPMEDI, is building an integrated clinical development platform that combines proprietary software, CRO services, and biotech investment to strengthen Asia's drug development ecosystem. A former consultant and fintech executive, he views clinical trials as fundamentally a data management challenge. Through AI, blockchain-based data integrity, and strategic support for Korean biotechs, JNPMEDI aims to transform strong science into trusted data and position Asia as a globally credible clinical development hub.
You come from an applied physics and fintech background rather than a pharma or clinical background. When did you realise that drug development was, at its core, a data management problem?
I studied applied physics at the University of Washington, and I am starting my Master of Public Health at Harvard this year. After my undergraduate degree, I began my career as a management consultant at Accenture, where I was heavily involved in digital transformation as well as growth strategy and operational innovation. Those projects taught me something I carry with me to this day: technology only works when it genuinely meets real value in a real industry. Technology by itself cannot do anything. And clinical trials are a particularly interesting case, because the complexity is so high – you are dealing with regulatory requirements and with human subjects simultaneously.
After my time in consulting, I joined one of Korea’s most successful start-ups – Dunamu and it is now in the process of merging with Naver. I was chief strategy officer of a wholly owned subsidiary, and that is where I developed a serious understanding of block chain technology. But throughout that period I was always searching for an industry where I could apply technology to a genuinely hard problem. My family had a legacy in healthcare in Korea, which gave me access I would not otherwise have had – the ability to meet with doctors and pharmaceutical company leaders directly. I used that access to form a hypothesis: could the clinical trial process be digitally transformed, and what platform would drive that transformation? I started interviewing the chief executives of CROs to test the idea. One of those CEOs now works for me.
What did those conversations tell you, and how did you build the first version of what became JNPMEDI?
They confirmed the hypothesis. All the money in a clinical trial ultimately transforms into data. Data is the deliverable. If you do not know how to manage and clean that data, nothing else functions. So when I founded the company in 2020, the first thing I built was Maven CDMS, our clinical data management system.
The incumbent competition was Medidata, which is a formidable player. But we had a genuine technical advantage: my colleagues had strong cloud capabilities, and we were confident we could build a better solution at a meaningfully lower price. The deeper question, though, was data integrity – which in clinical trials is not a secondary concern but the entire foundation. Every system used in a clinical trial must be validated to comply with FDA’s 21 CFR Part 11 regulations, and that validation process, developed roughly 20 years ago, is extraordinarily costly. You hire global quality assurance firms, spend enormous amounts, and receive a report thousands of pages long confirming that your audit trail is intact. We wanted to use technology to achieve that same level of integrity more efficiently.
The answer was blockchain. There are two major threats to data integrity in clinical trials. The first is external hacking – someone accessing the backend database and altering data without leaving a trail. The second, and more realistic, threat is internal: someone persuading an engineer to make a change that is not recorded in the audit trail. In a small company, this kind of thing can happen. What blockchain gives you is a parallel record of every single data point, so that even if the backend database is altered without an approved trail, the blockchain immediately flags that a modification has occurred at that point. The system itself says: we cannot assure valid data integrity after this data point. That is the core of our first patent, and it is a global patent.
Last year you saw 250 percent revenue growth and 100 new clients. Who are these clients and what does your track record look like today?
Clients are coming from everywhere. When we first launched our CRO business, the majority were medical device companies – that is an easier entry point. Now it is roughly half medical device and half new drug development. We are also working in both directions across the border: connecting overseas companies that want to conduct trials in Korea, and supporting Korean clients who want to pursue FDA or EMA approval.
We have completed over 300 clinical trials in total, and we are actively globalising our portfolio. For example, we are currently running a phase II study in Europe and the United States in partnership with IQVIA – they handle clinical operations, medical writing, and regulatory affairs, while we provide data management, statistics, and our technology platform. It is a complementary model, though at the group level IQVIA is a competitor. Their medical device subsidiary does partner with us, and we refer clients to each other in certain cases. The relationship works because we are significantly more cost-efficient than using IQVIA’s full-service offering for data management and statistics, and because we bring them clients – which reduces their cost of sales. It is a survival strategy for Korean CROs, and I think other Korean CROs should be thinking about it too.
You operate very differently in Korea versus globally. Can you walk us through that distinction?
In Korea, we do everything. The domestic market forces that on us. The CRO and professional services market here is smaller than most people realise, despite the large number of biotech companies. Korean biotechs have historically not invested enough in professional services, and the drug development history of the country is not long enough to have produced a deep bench of specialised professionals. Each segment of the value chain is simply too small to sustain a pure-play in any single area – a pure SaaS company, or a pure strategy firm, or a pure operations provider – while also meeting the validation requirements needed to work with global clients. You have to become large, and to become large in this market, you have to cover the full value chain.
That means regulatory strategy, clinical trial design, budget support, duration reduction, MFDS engagement, fundraising support, and helping clients sell their assets to global pharma. We have four medical doctors in the house. We sometimes act as a broker between Korean innovators and global pharmaceutical companies. We are, in effect, a company builder for Korean biotechs, because without that role, many of them cannot grow to the point where they have options.
Globally, the model is deliberately narrower and more systematic. We do not try to replicate the full-service domestic model internationally. We sell our software platform and bundle data management and statistics services around it. While India is widely recognized as a major hub for pharmacovigilance, Korea has established a powerful reputation of its own in this field. By leveraging Korea’s exceptional regulatory credibility, we offer top-tier PV services as a premier alternative for clients seeking options beyond the Indian market. Our strategy is to work as a technology and data management layer alongside local CROs in each market, acting as project manager and data lead while the local partner handles clinical operations. This allows Korean clients to reduce costs, reduces the language and visibility barrier, and gives local CROs access to our Korean client network. We have been executing this model across a growing number of studies, and once clients are satisfied, we extend the same structure to FDA-facing trials with a different local CRO partner. Only JNPMEDI can pursue this strategy, I believe, because we are the only CRO in Korea with a proprietary digital platform in house.
You have been integrating AI across your platform. Where are you deploying it, and how far away is truly autonomous clinical data management?
Korea is AI-ready in terms of ambition, but the medical records environment is among the most strictly regulated in the world. We cannot simply photograph an electronic medical record and automatically extract data into our system. We are the only CRO that has integrated our data pipeline with Seoul National University Hospital, but that was a pilot – it is not yet commercial. So the practical constraints are real.
Within those constraints, we are deploying AI in several areas that are genuinely valuable today. The first is automated query setup. We have accumulated clinical trial data across hundreds of studies, and we are using that data to have AI automatically generate queries for new trials – recognising the patterns of what needs to be flagged and checked. This alone saves week in the clinical trial preparation phase.
The second is CDISC format standardisation. Korean pharmaceutical companies each have their own preferred data formats and styles – something a traditional IT company would refuse to accommodate. Using AI, we can match any client’s preferred format to the CDISC standard automatically, regardless of how it was structured originally.
The third is what I would call intelligent clinical monitoring using retrieval-augmented generation. Our seasoned medical doctors have accumulated deep knowledge of trial trends and clinical events. We are encoding that knowledge into an AI system so that insights which previously required a senior consultant to deliver – flagging that a trial is trending toward a problem, or that site A is performing differently from site B – can be delivered systematically and at scale.
And the fourth is documentation automation. After a clinical trial, data managers must manually fill hundreds of pages of SOP appendix documentation, drawing data from our system and entering it into Microsoft Word forms. JNPMEDI has over 250 different forms in use. AI can now fill these automatically. That is a significant saving in data manager hours, and one that only a company with both the CRO operation and the software platform in house can achieve.
We were also the first company in Korea to build a use case on AWS Bedrock – Amazon’s secure AI service where your data never leaves the closed environment. We are now packaging that as a product to sell directly to pharmaceutical companies.
The fully autonomous clinical trial is not close. Human sign-off remains a regulatory requirement and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Technology must advance in parallel with regulation, and we work closely with regulators to ensure our processes can be validated and accepted. What AI is doing right now is eliminating weeks of preparation, reducing manual error, and freeing our professionals to focus on judgement rather than administration.
Tell us about the investment arm. Why does a CRO need to invest in its clients?
The logic is rooted in something I observed about Korean biotech that I find genuinely troubling. Korea has the third largest pharmaceutical pipeline in the world by number of assets. But the upfront licensing fee rate on Korean deals has been declining – last year the average was approximately 1.7 percent, which is extraordinarily low. Assets are being sold to global pharma before phase I is complete, sometimes even earlier. Companies are not reaching the data readouts that would give them real negotiating leverage.
The parallel I draw is from the 2008 financial crisis, when foreign capital came into Korea and acquired good Korean companies at distressed prices. Korea’s first domestic private equity funds were created at that time with the explicit purpose of protecting Korean companies and helping them grow to the point where they had real options – whether that meant selling to foreign capital on fair terms or continuing independently. I believe Korean biotechs need the same kind of support today.
Our investment arm is a separate legal entity for structural reasons, but the purpose is integrated: we invest directly in Korean biotechs, help them complete phase I, and then support them in negotiating with global pharmaceutical companies from a position of actual data rather than promise. Just helping a company with CRO services is not really helping them. Without getting them to the data, you are not changing their outcome. We have now invested in 23 companies.
I will also say this: the KOSDAQ listing requirement that Korean biotechs must demonstrate a global licensing deal before they can list is, in my view, killing the golden goose. It is forcing companies to sign deals too early, at terrible terms, just to access the capital markets. This is a regulatory issue that the government needs to address. The logic of protecting investors is understandable, but the outcome is the systematic undervaluation of Korean innovation. In the meantime, as a private sector actor, the best I can do is try to persuade founders directly: “do not sell too early. Let us do this together.”
As we conclude, what message would you like to share with the global partners, clients, and investors reading this.
Korea and Asia are no longer simply clinical trial locations. They are becoming important drug development hubs where innovative science and genuine clinical capabilities are advancing together. But for that innovation to be fully recognised in the global market, companies need trusted clinical data, regulatory readiness, and infrastructure that can connect operations across countries. That is the role JNPMEDI wants to play.
Our goal is to help Korean and Asian innovators enter the global market with greater confidence. We want to help strong science become strong data, strong data become global trust, and global trust lead to real business outcomes. Before JNPMEDI, most Korean and Asian clients relied on the large Western firms for the infrastructure to do that. It is time to build that infrastructure within Asia itself – not in opposition to Western partners, but as a complement to them.
In global clinical development, speed matters enormously. But trust matters more. What Korean and Asian innovation needs now is not more assets – those already exist and they are competitive. What is needed is the infrastructure to explain, verify, and earn trust for that innovation according to global standards. That is what JNPMEDI is building.
