GCMS, PBS Biotech sign distribution agreement for single-use bioreactors in Korea

PBS Biotech, Inc., a developer of state of the art single-use bioreactors for the fast growing biotechnology market, announced today it has signed an exclusive distribution agreement in Korea with Green Cross Medical Sciences Corp. (GCMS), a division of Green Cross Corporation, one of Korea's largest pharmaceutical firms. Under terms of the agreement GCMS will market, sell and support the complete line of PBS Biotech single-use bioreactors for R&D and production to the more than 200 biopharma firms of the burgeoning Korean drug, vaccine and biosimilar industry.

The Korean biopharma industry, now ranked the 12^th largest in the world and 4^th largest in Asia, has announced plans to be a major global supplier within the next two decades. Today, the country's pharmaceutical revenues top $20 billion with 8% coming from biotech.

"With the PBS Biotech family of bioreactors, GCMS is expanding the use of disposable bioreactors in the industry," said Mr. Seung-Sam Seo, president of GCMS. "We believe the PBS single-use bioreactor systems, which offer tremendous value and benefits to our customers, will be a significant and cost effective contributor in helping the industry meet the drug and vaccine needs of our own population and for international customers," he said.

"GCMS is a premier medical products sales and marketing organization well positioned to introduce and advance the application of our next generation bioreactor systems in the Korea market," said Dr. Brian Lee, president and co-founder of PBS Biotech.

Rapid adoption of single-use bioreactors is occurring across all stages of the bioprocess as firms embrace single-use technology to drive out costs in both R&D and production while increasing process flexibility, operational efficiency and accelerating time to market. PBS Biotech bioreactors, which employ a low shear Air Wheel™ mixing mechanism, are used in developing plant, animal and insect cell cultures in lab, clinical, seed train and production uses. The bioreactors work with popular industry probes, sensors and analytic devices and perfusion systems including Refine Technology.

Single-use means they use disposable plastic media vessels or bags to grow cell cultures. Unlike the large and complex conventional stainless steel and glass bioreactor systems, which are expensive to buy and operate and require extensive cleaning using massive amounts of water and other utilities, the disposable or single-use bioreactor vessel or bag is used one time and discarded. The industry is rapidly moving to single-use not only to save cost and accelerate time to market but also to promote a 'green biopharma environment' and more sustainable operations.

"Our single-use bioreactors are the products of choice for any size biopharma firm migrating from costly and fragmented legacy lab to production bioreactor equipment to a single-use solution providing unequalled mixing performance, low profile and ease of use," stated James B. Schultz, PBS Biotech vice president of sales and marketing. "With PBS and its channel partners we help create, deliver and measure specific value for our customers resulting in distinct competitive advantage for their business," he said.