Alteogen announced on Monday that it has recruited Lee Young-pil, who has over 30 years of experience in biopharmaceutical development, as its executive vice president and Chief Product Officer (CPO).

CPO Lee is an expert in Korean biopharmaceutical development, with over 24 years of experience at LG Life Sciences (now LG Chem Life Sciences) and Samsung Bioepis, where he led the entire CMC (chemistry, manufacturing, and control) team. In particular, he played a key role in obtaining seven approvals from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for anticancer and immune biosimilars.

Most recently, he served as a co-CEO of a gene therapy venture, where he led R&D strategy and business development.

While CPO is typically a product strategy role in the IT platform industry, Alteogen has appointed Lee to the position of Vice President and Chief Product Officer, with integrated responsibility for CMC, quality, production, and commercialization. The company stated that the move was made to provide more strategic and operational leadership in translating the original technology into commercial products.

The company expects this latest appointment to maximize synergies between his expertise across the CMC lifecycle and Alteogen's commercialization strategy.

“I took my first step into the bio industry through former Alteogen CEO Park Soon-jae 30 years ago, and I have always cherished that relationship,” Lee said. “Based on the experience I have gained, I will inherit the management philosophy of the founder and do my best to help Alteogen grow into a stable and sustainable global bio company.”

Alteogen said it expects the addition of Dr. Lee to strengthen further its pipeline development and technology transfer execution capabilities, as well as its collaboration base with global partners.