Seo Jung-jin

Seo Jung-jin is the founder and honorary chairman of Celltrion, South Korea's largest biopharmaceutical company and the world's leading developer and manufacturer of biosimilar antibodies. A former Daewoo executive, Seo founded Celltrion in 2002 in Incheon with the audacious goal of manufacturing complex biological drugs — a domain then dominated exclusively by Western pharmaceutical giants like Johnson & Johnson, Roche, and AbbVie. Seo's landmark achievement was the development and regulatory approval of Remsima (marketed as Inflectra in the U.S.), the world's first biosimilar monoclonal antibody, in 2013. This drug — a biosimilar of Johnson & Johnson's blockbuster Remicade (infliximab) — broke open the biosimilar antibody market and demonstrated that Korean companies could manufacture the most complex biological drugs to the same quality standards as Big Pharma. Celltrion followed with biosimilars of Herceptin (trastuzumab), Rituxan (rituximab), and Avastin (bevacizumab). Under Seo's vision, Celltrion merged with Celltrion Healthcare (its marketing and distribution arm) in 2024, creating a vertically integrated biopharma company. The combined entity controls everything from drug development and manufacturing to global marketing and distribution. Seo's decisions on pipeline expansion into novel biologics (beyond biosimilars), manufacturing capacity investment, global pricing strategy for biosimilars, and the development of subcutaneous formulations that command premium pricing are the primary drivers of Celltrion's stock.