Kwon Yong-joon, Director of the Precision Medicine Technology Center, at the Integrated BioBank of Luxembourg (IBBL) under the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) in Dudelange, Luxembourg, on the 16th (local time). Dudelange (Luxembourg) = Joint Reporting Team of the Korean Federation of Science Journalists
“Luxembourg is attractive because it’s an easy entry point into Europe. You can start here and then move into bigger markets like France, Germany, and Belgium.”
On the 16th (local time), at the Integrated BioBank of Luxembourg (IBBL) under the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) in Dudelange, Luxembourg, Kwon Yong-joon, Director of the Precision Medicine Technology Center, stressed that Luxembourg can serve as a bridgehead for Korean companies seeking to enter the European market.
Luxembourg has a population of only 690,000, of whom 320,000 are foreigners, accounting for nearly half. The domestic market is small, but the high proportion of foreign residents makes it possible to test services on people from diverse backgrounds. It is also easy to reach government officials and regulators, which means feedback comes quickly. In other words, it has strong advantages as a testbed.
Kwon positions himself as a “connector” linking Korean and European companies and researchers. He actively leverages the Korean network he built while working at the Institut Pasteur Korea and Samsung Medical Center, along with his European network developed in France and Luxembourg.
“Many Koreans go to the United States for graduate studies, so we have a lot of U.S. connections,” Kwon said. “But our networks in Europe are relatively weak, which often means that even if we want to take on European projects, we don’t have partners.”
At the end of March this year, LIH opened a Korean office in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, home to several major hospitals and the National Cancer Center, and has been emphasizing its role as a formal interface between Korean and European companies and research institutions.
One flagship project Kwon is promoting with Korean companies and institutions is the International Health Data Space Initiative (IHDSI), involving LIH, the National Cancer Center, Naver Cloud, and others.
In the race for medical artificial intelligence (AI), standardized and reliable data is paramount. Securing large-scale patient datasets collected under uniform criteria is the key.
Currently, patient medical data cannot be freely transferred across institutions or national borders due to issues such as privacy protection, which is a major constraint. IHDSI aims to overcome the challenge of cross-border movement of medical data by allowing researchers to run only the necessary analyses in a secure, controlled virtual analysis environment, without physically moving the data.
“No new drug is developed exclusively for a single ethnicity,” Kwon noted. “If we can compare Korean and European datasets side by side, we can conduct research that is applicable to both Asian and Western populations.”
The Precision Medicine Technology Center led by Kwon is a translational medicine research center dedicated to turning medical research outcomes into tangible benefits for patients.
Kwon likens his role to “cutting and polishing gemstones.” When basic researchers or hospitals bring in high-quality disease models and patient samples, his team refines them technologically and converts them into tools industry can actually use, such as treatment data for hospitals or datasets that basic researchers can utilize for follow-up studies.
“You need precise diagnostics to deliver appropriate treatment, and once you accumulate treatment data, you can begin to predict patient outcomes,” he explained. “As more of this data is collected, it becomes possible to design policies for disease prevention. It’s not a set of isolated research activities, but a single, continuous cycle.”
At present, the center is focusing on creating cancer organoids—tumor-like organ structures derived from analysis of patients’ genomes—and testing multiple drugs on them to observe their responses.
As Kwon sees it, Luxembourg’s strategy is about focus, selectivity, and collaboration. It starts from acknowledging the country’s limitations in population and resources. From there, Luxembourg identifies areas where it can outperform other countries and builds sharp, distinctive competitiveness by drawing on support from its neighbors.
“Luxembourg recognizes that the country cannot function based solely on its own citizens,” he said. “The next step is to think about what can be achieved with help from its surroundings.”
Dudelange (Luxembourg) = Joint Reporting Team of the Korean Federation of Science Journalists
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