South Korea-based SK bioscience (KRX: 302440) has licensed injectable inactivated rotavirus vaccine technology from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making it the first Korean company to receive vaccine technology from the CDC. The deal, backed by co-investment from South Korean funding agency the RIGHT Foundation, targets a critical efficacy gap in low- and middle-income countries where existing oral rotavirus vaccines demonstrate sub-50% effectiveness.
Financial terms of the CDC license were not disclosed. The RIGHT Foundation, a Korean public-private partnership backed by the Korean government and the Gates Foundation, signed a separate R&D funding agreement with SK bioscience in June 2025 to support vaccine process development.
All currently approved rotavirus vaccines — including GSK's Rotarix and Merck's RotaTeq — are oral live-attenuated formulations. The CDC-developed candidate is an injectable inactivated vaccine, a modality that has not previously reached the market for rotavirus. The CDC previously sponsored a Phase I clinical trial of the technology before licensing it to SK bioscience.
The injectable format is scientifically relevant to the LMIC problem. Oral rotavirus vaccines achieve over 85% effectiveness in high-income settings but fall below 50% in low-income countries, an efficacy gap attributed to gut immune interference, poor nutritional status, and environmental enteropathy. An injectable route bypasses mucosal delivery and may generate more consistent systemic immune responses across populations. The inactivated format also eliminates theoretical safety concerns in severely immunocompromised infants — a consideration in high-HIV-burden settings — where live-attenuated oral vaccines carry residual risk.
SK bioscience plans to establish a domestic production process aimed at simultaneously improving vaccine efficacy and reducing manufacturing costs, before advancing through clinical trials and seeking regulatory approval.