Regional hubs become the starting point for research and production

The center of gravity in the natural products industry is shifting from individual corporate laboratories to shared regional infrastructure. With the opening of an open testing lab in the Yeongnam region that makes equipment and testing facilities available—resources that small and medium-sized firms often find difficult to secure on their own—the barrier to entering R&D is being lowered for regional companies that have long faced major accessibility gaps.

This trend is not stopping at research support; it is also leading to the relocation of production bases. As companies invest KRW 13 billion to build new health functional food manufacturing plants, and local governments expand overseas market access on the back of achievements such as export contracts worth USD 4.19 million, efforts to connect region-based industries to actual sales and employment are becoming increasingly evident.

Medicinal crops shift from raw materials to industrial assets

Medicinal crops are now being treated not merely as traditional raw materials but as industrial assets that can be standardized and commercialized. Cases such as the development of a new Trichosanthes kirilowii variety with an application for plant variety protection, and the transfer of technology for a method of manufacturing herbal candy containing peony extract, show the view that market expansion is only possible when consistency in raw materials and suitability for processing are secured first.

These changes are also reflected in workforce development. Universities are operating an international education model that began with 17 enrolled students through a joint program in natural product pharmaceuticals, seeking to secure practice-oriented personnel in advance who can carry medicinal plant cultivation and research through to industrialization.

From competing on efficacy to competing on validation systems

The basis of competition in the natural products and herbal medicine sectors is also shifting from simply discovering materials to establishing validation systems. The Central Pharmaceutical Affairs Council discussed proposals to introduce identification tests for herbal medicinal materials and to improve testing methods. At the same time, in the online market, 47 cases, or 15.7%, were found to involve false or exaggerated advertising, making clear the need for stronger oversight of quality and labeling.

Rules are becoming more detailed at the consumer stage as well. Systems such as the pilot project allowing person-to-person transactions of health functional foods have emerged to permit limited trading, but the fact that they scrutinize whether products are unopened, certification labels, and storage conditions means that as natural product-based goods become more deeply embedded in everyday life, standards for safety and accountability are becoming tighter as well.

The next stage of natural products research

In research settings, the scope of natural product utilization is expanding beyond reinterpreting experience-based prescriptions toward precision data-driven drug development. Development of MT101, a candidate treatment for Parkinson’s disease, and the advancement of KLIMS, an herbal medicine experimental information management system, show that data systems capable of handling clinical and non-clinical information, as well as compound and genomic data together, are essential for explaining and predicting the effects of complex components.

This also means that natural products have entered a stage where they can no longer be evaluated primarily on the basis of tradition and image. Going forward, competitiveness is likely to depend less on how quickly new materials can be discovered and more on whether those materials can be standardized, validated, and integrated into a consistent system spanning production and distribution.