Dongkook Pharmaceutical said Monday it has signed a business agreement with Efil Bioscience to promote their joint research into new drugs.

The two companies aim to develop promising new drugs, derive one or more non-clinical candidate substances by the end of this year, and conduct non-clinical research for an investigational new drug (IND) in 2023.

They expect the recent accord will create synergy in the joint research for new drug development by utilizing their expertise in non-clinical efficacy tests using the cholesterol metabolism inhibitor library, drug delivery system, product commercialization, approval, and marketing.

Dongkook and Efil also plan to form a joint committee to cooperate in the overall process related to new drug development and commercialization, including discovery and derivation of candidate substances, securing patents and rights and technology transfers.

“Efil Bioscience is a promising company with an excellent R&D pipeline, conducting various joint researches with leading U.S. universities,” Dongkook Pharmaceutical Research Center Director Lee Kea-wan said. “By combining our drug development and production capacity and DDS (Drug Delivery System) platform technology, we plan to create synergies and bring out results.”

Efil Bioscience CEO Kim Jung-hoon said, “We have high expectations about our cooperation with Dongkook Pharmaceutical, which has excellent drug development platform technology and capabilities.”

Kim added that based on the expertise of both companies, Efil would strive to develop an excellent new drug pipeline.

Efil Bioscience is a company that has pipelines to treat Prader-Willi Syndrome, a rare high-obesity disease, overcome drug resistance, and treat degenerative brain diseases such as dementia. The company is developing new drugs jointly with Purdue University, Dartmouth College, the University of Delaware, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.