Located on the Natural Sciences Campus (Suwon) of Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), the CNS Research Center (Central Nervous System Research Center, Ilhan Hall) stands as South Korea’s leading industry-academia convergence hub for neuroscience and innovative biopharmaceutical research, uniting academia, pharmaceutical enterprise, and a biotech venture.
The SKKU CNS Research Center is a cutting-edge neuroscience and biopharmaceutical research complex spanning three basement levels and eight above-ground floors, jointly established through the shared vision of three key parties: Sungkyunkwan University, Yuhan Corporation, and IMNEWRUN Inc.
Professor Yong Ho Kim plays a pivotal role from the inception of the SKKU CNS Center to leading its core research, serving as both a primary knowledge generator and a driver of commercialization. As one of the three foundational pillars behind the establishment of the center, IMNEWRUN Inc. is a biotechnology venture founded through an SKKU faculty startup initiative, where Prof. Kim serves as Co-founder and Vice President (VP). By founding a venture based on university-derived core technologies and scaling it into a large-scale industry-academia collaboration model with Yuhan Corporation and SKKU, he provided the critical catalyst for establishing both the physical and technological foundation of the CNS Center. The primary research areas of Prof. Kim’s laboratory (Department of Nano Engineering / SAINT) include AI-driven protein sequence-structure-function modeling, de novo protein design, and the development of targeted nanocarriers.
Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) Penetration & Targeted Delivery: Prof. Kim’s protein design technologies are directly applied to developing targeted protein/peptide materials and overcoming the blood-brain barrier—the most formidable obstacle in developing therapeutics for central nervous system (CNS) disorders.
Precision Design of Gene Therapies: Prof. Kim's AI-based protein design algorithms generate substantial synergy with the CNS Center’s biofoundry infrastructure—for example, by collaboratively engineering gene-editing proteins with dramatically improved stability through structure-based engineering (such as engineered SaCas9 variants) alongside IMNEWRUN.
Far beyond a conventional university research facility, the SKKU CNS Research Center (Ilhan Hall) serves as an innovation-driven industry-academia outpost where Prof. Yong Ho Kim’s foundational technologies in AI protein design and nanobiotechnology are translated into tangible biopharmaceutical development through the platforms of IMNEWRUN and Yuhan Corporation.
