The Korea Exchange (KRX) held a corporate review committee on Thursday and decided to maintain the listing of SillaJen on the tech-heavy Kosdaq market.

With the decision, SillaJen's shares will resume trading on Thursday.

The company used to be one of the most prominent local biopharmaceutical companies with a market value of 10 trillion won ($7 billion) and the second-largest Kosdaq-listed firm by market cap.

However, shares of Sillajen nosedived in 2019 after the biotech firm aborted its phase-3 PHOCUS trial for Pexa-Vec in liver cancer.

The year 2020 was also rough for the company, with the Seoul Southern District Court issuing an arrest warrant for the former Sillajen CEO Moon Eun-sang on charges of using undisclosed information to sell his company stocks and committing other irregularities in May.

This, in turn, led to the KRX's decision to halt the trading of the company's stocks on May 4, 2020.

During that time, the KRX conducted a review by the Corporate Review Committee in November 2020 and granted a one-year improvement period.

However, after the improvement period ended, the KRX's Corporate Review Committee again evaluated the company's efforts were insufficient to maintain the listing and tentatively decided to delist the company in January 2022.

However, the KRX ultimately decided to again grant an additional six-month improvement period to improve business practices, which ended on Aug. 18.

During the improvement period, SillaJen made efforts to secure new pipelines and appointed a new CEO to meet the KRX's request to diversify the company's pipeline and fill all internal directors with biopharmaceutical-related people.

The resumption of trading for SillaJen's shares comes as a relief for retail investors holding a large percentage of shares.

SillaJen has about 160,000 retail investors, with minority shareholders holding more than 90 percent of the company's total shares.