Insight - How South Korea turbocharged specialty syringe production

Cho Mi-heui, vice president of PoongLim Pharmatech Inc. showcases a sample of a low dead space (LDS) syringe after an interview with Reuters at a company office in Gunsan, South Korea, April 5, 2021. - Reuters

IT was 7:30am on Christmas Eve when Cha Jung-hoon, South Korea’s deputy minister for small businesses, got a call from his boss to make an urgent three-hour car trip to visit syringe maker Poonglim Pharmatech.

The brief: work out how the government could convince and aid Poonglim, which had only about 80 employees, to rapidly scale up production of their low dead space (LDS) syringes, a type of syringe designed to minimise the amount of a drug left in the device after injection. “It might help us get more vaccines, ” Cha recalls then-minister Park Young-sun telling him.