Macrogen, a Korean genome analysis company, held a groundbreaking ceremony on Tuesday to commence construction of the “nation's largest” genome foundry, Macrogen Sejong Campus, in Sejong City for innovation in genome analysis.

Macrogen Chairman Seo Jung-sun and Global Business CEO Lee Su-kang were among the attendees at the groundbreaking ceremony. 

The Macrogen Sejong Campus will be built on an area of 3,570㎡ in Sejong Tech Valley's 4-2 living area. 

The company plans to complete the construction in the second half of 2024.

Macrogen will use the Sejong campus as the hub of the domestic genome market to strengthen its service supply power with the nation's highest-level capabilities and competitiveness in the entire value chain of the genome industry, a company official said.

With the Macrogen Songdo Global Campus scheduled to be completed in 2025, these two projects are expected to create two major genome foundry ecosystems to maximize competitiveness by drastically increasing production capacity in Korea as well as in global markets, and reducing costs through automation.

A genome foundry refers to a platform that vertically integrates the value chain of the genome business from R&D to production, sales marketing, and customers to streamline and speed up the entire process.

In addition, as the genome market has grown rapidly, securing excellent manpower has become important to train bio experts in cooperation with major universities in the southern part of Chungnam.

"We will start construction of the Sejong campus, which will serve as a future comprehensive genome center in Sejong City,” Macrogen Chairman Seo said. “This will be an outpost for Macrogen’s Global Healthcare, providing 7.8 billion people with individual genetic designs, playing an important role in pursuing future health."