McLean, VA–February 20, 2002–When South Korea announced last year that it would open a biotech incubator in San Diego, few in this part of southern California seemed concerned.
But the news caught the attention of U.S. counterintelligence officials, who believe Korea’s advancements to nurture its pharmaceutical endeavors could cost San Diego’s own booming biotech industry.
The Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive has warned in a report that the planned facility, dubbed “Korea BioValley,” is part of South Korea’s ongoing efforts to steal U.S. technology secrets in California.
The BioValley ”parallels” South Korea’s efforts to boost its high-tech industry by opening a center in San Jose to reproduce the latest advances from Silicon Valley firms, the counterintelligence organization reports.
Government representatives in Seoul denied the report. In fact, officials say the San Diego County plan, still on the drawing board, is aimed at helping South Korean biotech firms obtain inexpensive office space to conduct marketing, joint research and development projects, and other operations in the United States.
The park, planned for Carlsbad, 25 miles north of San Diego, will house about 50 South Korean companies, government officials say.
”It’s like I-tech centers or parks we operate in Silicon Valley, Boston, Shanghai, Tokyo, London and other places and has nothing to do with technology spying,” Hwang Soo-sung, an official at the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, told The Associated Press.
The plan, Hwang explains, is being conceived at the request of small biotech firms, which cannot afford to move into the U.S. market individually.
Joseph Panetta, president of BIOCOM/San Diego, a local industry trade group, has called the $7 million project ”fairly insignificant.”
But the counterintelligence organization’s report indicates that the Korea BioValley project follows a pattern set by South Korea’s $15 million IPark Venture Campus in San Jose.
”Seoul’s move to establish a high-tech ‘liaison center’ in the heartland of the U.S. biotech industry parallels its efforts some five years earlier to comb Silicon Valley for information technology, a field where South Korea now enjoys some commanding leads,” the report says.
The IPark center, which hosts more 60 Korean-owned start-ups, helps companies ”exploit local markets and facilitate exchanges of technology,” according to its Web site.
Economic espionage has attracted growing attention in business and government circles, according to The American Society for Industrial Security, which estimates the nation’s 1,000 largest companies lose $45 billion annually due to the theft of proprietary information.
The move into San Diego County would put the Korean firms in the nation’s third-largest concentration of public biotech companies, behind San Francisco and Boston, according to an annual study of the industry by Ernst & Young.
Economic espionage is of particular concern to the 400 public and private biotech firms in San Diego, which poured a combined $1.9 billion into researching and developing marketable products.
”Intellectual property is where 99 percent of the value lies in most biotech companies,” Panetta says. ”They’re very protective of their intellectual property.”