Celltrion is poised to bolster its competitiveness in the global pharmaceutical market by fully integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its three core business areas: new drug development, manufacturing, and administration.
On Tuesday, Celltrion announced that through this AI transformation (AX), it aims to automate repetitive tasks and focus more on essential work, thereby accelerating its global competitiveness.
Celltrion is currently leveraging AI extensively in new drug development. Last year, Celltrion established a dedicated team for AI-based drug development and is progressively implementing AI in various stages of development, including identifying, validating, and optimizing new drug target candidates using bioinformatics (BI) and AI technologies. Through these efforts, Celltrion anticipates a dramatic reduction in the development timeline, which typically spans over a decade, along with significant cost savings.
Furthermore, the company is conducting ‘reskilling’ programs for its researchers to enhance their data analysis and AI utilization capabilities, while also building a pipeline through ‘open innovation’ partnerships with external AI specialists.
In the manufacturing sector, Celltrion is focusing on implementing smart factories using physical AI, particularly in its newly established facilities. At the planned Drug Substance plants 4 and 5 in Songdo, the company intends to deploy autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), automated logistics warehouses, intelligent robotic arms, collaborative robots, and advanced manufacturing management software to elevate factory automation levels.
The company’s strategy involves first automating standardized tasks until the factory’s completion, followed by integrating AI into high-value decision-making processes to maximize production efficiency. Looking further ahead, as technology matures, Celltrion plans to introduce humanoid robots to automate complex, unstructured tasks at human-equivalent levels.
In administration, Celltrion is already actively employing AI for data analysis, dashboard creation, and insight generation, with plans to gradually expand its applications. Notably, simulations of chatbot integration with the company’s electronic document management system (EDMS) suggest that time spent on routine tasks like document searches and comparisons could be slashed by approximately 80-90% compared to current methods.
Celltrion’s AX initiative will be implemented through a two-track strategy combining a bottom-up approach driven by employees and a top-down approach for company-wide solution development. Employees will directly implement automation tools tailored to their departmental needs, while company-level experts will develop and apply specialized AI-based systems for tasks such as document creation and yield optimization.
Through this strategy, Celltrion aims to foster voluntary AI adoption among employees and establish workflow-specific systems, achieving both immediate improvements in work efficiency and long-term goals of maximizing AI utilization across all business processes.
A Celltrion spokesperson stated that the AI technology we’re actively implementing this year is effectively broadening our automation capabilities and continuously enhancing work efficiency. It’s committed to evolving into a global, comprehensive pharmaceutical company with a complete AI value chain spanning from drug development to all business operations.
Celltrion’s AI integration is becoming an integral part of its new corporate culture. Following AI utilization training sessions conducted this year, employee satisfaction surveys consistently showed over 90% approval ratings for AI adoption.
Celltrion Chairman Seo Jeong-jin, in his New Year’s address last January, emphasized that the current era, where AI is fundamentally reshaping the industrial landscape, demands strategic decisions to prepare for the future, signaling the company’s move towards an AI-driven platform.