[Edaily Reporter Kim Ji-wan] #BioFDC announced on the 18th that it will participate as a joint research and development partner in the Rural Development Administration’s national R&D project titled “Development of Technologies for the Production and Utilization of Natural Active Biomaterials Derived from Special Crops.”

This project is being carried out to establish an industrialization foundation that spans the discovery of functional plant cells, the establishment of cell lines, large-scale cultivation, raw material standardization, regulatory approval, and prototype development. The project title is “Development of Plant Cells Optimized for the Production of High-Value Functional Materials.”

The National Institute of Agricultural Sciences is leading the project, with a total of eight institutions participating, including BioFDC, the Sejong University Industry-Academia Cooperation Foundation, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), and the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB). The research will continue until December 2030.

The total research and development budget amounts to approximately 7.5 billion won. BioFDC will receive approximately 1.4 billion won in research funding to develop new plant cell-based food ingredients and establish mass production processes.

This project focuses on the industrial application of plant cell culture technology to overcome the limitations of existing natural product production methods, which are influenced by climate and cultivation environments. The goal is to establish a foundation for the stable production of functional ingredients of consistent quality, regardless of season or cultivation location, by culturing plant cells in a sterile environment.

In particular, BioFDC plans to establish highly functional plant cell lines centered on plants with high industrial potential—such as camellia, rock pine, mugwort, and rosemary—and select superior cell lines by evaluating their anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activities as well as cellular stability. Additionally, the company intends to increase the productivity of active metabolites by utilizing elicitors and culture environment control technologies, and to maximize culture efficiency by applying its proprietary RF-based SMART-RC² platform.

Production scale will be expanded in stages, starting with a 20-liter laboratory process, moving through 100-liter pilot production, and eventually reaching a 500-liter-class large-scale culture system. The company plans to establish a production and quality management system applicable to actual industrial settings by standardizing key quality indicators such as culture time, agitation speed, recovery rate, and marker component content.

The results of this R&D will extend beyond academic papers and patents to commercialization. In the food sector, the company plans to pursue the temporary food ingredient approval process, while in the cosmetics sector, it intends to conduct efficacy verification using skin cells and develop prototypes such as ampoules, creams, and sheet masks.

Through this project, BioFDC aims to further strengthen the competitiveness of its plant cell platform—which encompasses everything from raw material discovery to cell line selection, mass production, quality control, and product application—and to emerge as a platform company that custom-designs and produces functional raw materials.

A company official stated, “This national R&D project will serve as a crucial opportunity to expand plant cell technology beyond the laboratory level into an industrial production platform,” adding, “Based on our accumulated plant cell technology and the SMART-RC² platform, we will establish a stable supply system for functional biomaterials and contribute to the development of the green bio industry.”