Sanofi-Aventis Korea, the local affiliate of France-based global health care company Sanofi, said Thursday it has sealed a partnership with two leading Korean universities to jointly research and develop a new range of immune cell therapies.

Sanofi is joining hands with Korea’s leading science research universities KAIST and Seoul National University to develop an “immune cell therapy platform” to produce high-performance immune cell therapies to treat cancer.

The global pharma giant is looking to combine the effects of a new antibody developed by a team of researchers at SNU’s College of Medicine with a new peptide developed by KAIST, using upgraded stem cell technology developed by another team at SNU.

The team’s goal is to “develop an upgraded immune cell platform that minimizes damage to normal cells during immune cell therapy” by improving the immune system’s ability to tell normal cells apart from those that seem “foreign,” said SNU Professor Chung Jun-ho, whose team developed the new antibody.

“Upon commercialization, the platform will greatly reduce the amount of side effects in treating common cancers like liver cancer and enable maximized treatment effects,” Chung said.

“We plan to develop the first immune cell platform to treat cancer in the Asia-Pacific region,” said KAIST’s Chun Sang-yong. “We hope to create successful synergy between Korea’s academic circles and a global pharmaceutical company.”

The recent cooperative partnership comes as Sanofi continues its efforts to promote “open innovation,” a paradigm encouraging firms to partner with outside actors to share knowledge to accelerate internal innovation.

“Sanofi has been making diverse efforts for the advancement of the Korean pharmaceutical sector by striking strategic R&D partnerships, working to discover and develop new drug technologies through open innovation,” said Kim Sang-kyun from Sanofi’s research and development division.

“This three-way partnership will set the foundation for Sanofi to embark onto the local and global immune cell therapy segment in the future,” he said.

Sanofi-Aventis Korea, which was named an “innovative pharmaceutical company” by the Health Ministry in 2014, is currently engaged in an ongoing partnership with a number of biotechnology companies and research institutions including the Asan Medical Center and local biotech venture ANRT.

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)