[BIO KOREA 2025] With GSK money in hand, ABL Bio guts old model and rebuilds in Gangnam

The Korean biotech that sold its brain drug shuttle to GSK for 4.1 billion won ($2.9 billion) isn’t celebrating. It’s renovating -- everything.

ABL Bio is reengineering the platform that underpinned the deal. It’s also abandoning what no longer fits. Weaker programs are being cut. Siloed departments are being folded together. Even the company’s geography is changing.

Soon, all 110 employees will move into a new 12-story tower in southern Seoul’s Gangnam district. The symbolism isn’t lost on CEO Lee Sang-hoon.

“Why should only IT companies be in Gangnam?” he said during a Thursday interview with Korea Biomedical Review, seated inside ABL’s booth at BIO KOREA 2025. His own office is on the top floor of that building, though this conversation took place a few blocks away, at COEX.

The new headquarters will stack six floors for R&D and CMC, three for operations, one for communal space. It will replace the three scattered Pangyo offices ABL used to lease -- offices where departments were split and the company’s animal lab had to move multiple times. One was shared with Institut Pasteur Korea, where the rent kept rising. “They hinted we might have to leave,” Lee said. “So we did.”

His philosophy is simple. “Everything should be on one site,” he said. “R&D, management and strategy need to be able to sit down and hash things out in real time.”

That physical consolidation mirrors a strategic one. ABL is still riding the momentum of its April GSK deal, inked for up to 4.1 trillion won. The focus of that agreement -- Grabody-B, ABL’s blood-brain barrier (BBB) shuttle platform -- has already evolved. The company has added CD98hc as a second target alongside IGF1R to boost brain penetration and is now building a dual-format version for both antibody and siRNA delivery.

Most competitors still rely on transferrin receptor (TfR), a pathway Lee says fades with age. “IGF1R doesn’t,” he said. “That matters.”

Denali Therapeutics has watched two Alzheimer’s partnerships -- one with Biogen, another with Takeda -- unravel in the past two years after toxicity concerns and clinical holds. “They got huge upfronts. Now it’s all gone,” Lee said. The message was clear: innovation buys attention, but evolution buys time. “This is about long-term tech,” he said. “You have to keep moving. If your platform doesn’t evolve into a second generation, it’s dead.”

That urgency is driving more than internal change. In October last year, ABL Bio partnered with Korean ADC developer IntoCell to combine ABL’s bispecific antibodies with IntoCell’s proprietary payloads. The deal was just the beginning. IntoCell is eyeing 10 more partnerships by 2028, and Lee said the ABL collaboration could expand.

“It’s a solid platform,” he said. “We might go deeper.” Beyond that, though? “I’m not looking for more domestic deals,” he said. “I don’t see much value.”

The company is also pruning. ABL501, a PD-L1/LAG-3 bispecific immunotherapy, was discontinued after phase 1. Even though the data looked promising, with efficacy and safety all there, it wasn’t enough to keep.

The stock dropped 8.5 percent that day. Lee wasn’t bothered. “So what about it?” he said. “I see companies claim they’re changing the indication. That’s just noise. You drop what doesn’t work.”

In place of discarded programs, ABL is doubling down on a tighter set of priorities: its BBB platform, bispecific ADCs, and a slate of 4-1BB–based immunotherapies. One of the most promising: ABL001, a DLL4/VEGF bispecific antibody licensed to Compass Therapeutics.

Earlier this year, ABL001 hit its primary endpoint in a pivotal trial for advanced biliary tract cancer, tripling response rates over chemotherapy. Compass is planning an FDA meeting this quarter to discuss a potential BLA. Lee believes fast-track designation is likely. If greenlit, he said, royalties could start arriving by late 2025 or early 2026.

The same candidate is being tested in colorectal and possibly ovarian cancers, with even broader upside on the table. Colorectal, in particular, has Lee’s attention. “The market is huge,” he said. “We could get royalties in the hundreds of billions of won.”

“But no,” he added. “It won’t be a trillion-won drug.”

Even so, if ABL001 delivers, it could bankroll what Lee calls “ABL 3.0," a new phase of company growth centered on bigger licensing deals, more late-stage assets, and a leap beyond central nervous systems (CNS) into siRNA and immunology. “We’re aiming for what SystImmune did with BMS, hopefully something bigger,” he said, pointing to the $8.4 billion antibody-drug conjugate deal that included $800 million upfront. “That level of capital opens doors for acquisitions and new modalities. It lets you stop playing defense.”

That momentum now turns toward the BIO International Convention, taking place June 16 to 19, where Lee said meetings are "already lined up" to strengthen existing partnerships and finalize new licensing deals tied to ABL’s evolving platform strategy. “There aren’t 100 companies who can do this,” he said. “Maybe 10 globally. And only Big Pharmas have the capacity to take a CNS drug through phase 3.”

But ambition still runs up against reality. Lee said ABL spent about 70 billion won on R&D last year. For now, he says, the company is still in survival mode. “We live like day laborers,” he said. “We earn, we spend. If royalties come in, we finally get to plan forward.”