The Korean Intellectual Property Office will establish a patent information map to make the relevant data more accessible both to the public and to researchers seeking a cure for COVID-19, officials said Tuesday.

Commissioner Park Won-joo on Tuesday visited Syntekabio, a genomic big data manager and artificial intelligence developer in Daejeon. With their counterparts from the Korean Society for Bioinformatics, KIPO officials discussed how AI could be used to analyze conventional drug information to deduce which substances might be valid candidates to treat the new coronavirus.

After carrying out a joint analysis with the KSBI, the IP office is seeking to present the findings at BIOINFO 2020 in August and will also post them on its webpage.

“For the past 20 years, (Korea) has laid the groundwork for the biomedical informatics sector,” Park said.

“Such progress, combined with the analytical skill of AI, proved out its worth amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Earlier this month, the Korean government shared its experiences of handling the epidemic in a 90-page policy report titled “Flattening the Curve on COVID-19.”

The latest brochure was drafted jointly by the Finance Ministry, ICT Ministry, Interior Ministry, Land Ministry and Korean Intellectual Property Office.

Distributed to the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, foreign governments and the press, the data focused primarily on how the country used ICT and AI technology to assess the COVID-19 situation and respond.

In a follow-up action, KIPO presented an overview to its counterparts on how Asia’s fourth-largest economy maximized public-private partnerships in the face of the epidemic.

“South Korea has risen to the center of international attention with its test kits and unique systems such as K-walk-throughs,” Park said in a teleconference held late Monday with 16 key IP offices around the world and the World Intellectual Property Organization.

By Bae Hyun-jung (tellme@heraldcorp.com)