An industrial dispute over the origin of botox (botulinum toxin) may develop into a court battle.

Medytox Inc. unveiled the base sequence of its toxin widely used for beauty and cosmetic injections to minimize wrinkles, challenging its local rivals to do same after it claimed the base toxin strain of Daewoong Pharm Co. exactly matched its Clostridium botulinum type A Hall strain.

Daewoong Pharm Co. and Hugel Inc. charging theirs have been extracted from natural resources as soil and food waste, questioned the legitimacy of the toxin source in the Medytox neurotoxin agents and reportedly have embarked on legal study to a court battle.

Daewoong Pharm president Lee Jong-wook said Thursday "Medytox should receive validation by authorities with supporting evidence of its toxin source, instead of sticking to the release of the DNA base sequence of the toxin.

Lee said several study results related to botox were published in the 1990s and Daewoong Pharm’s Nabota was officially approved by the Ministry of Health and Welfare with all related materials to support its product, disputing Medytox’ argument that the odds to discover a botox in the soil is as low as to win the lottery.

Lee also said Medytox’ toxin strain claiming to have come from the University of Wisconsin must be validated, saying “the toxin has been suspected of being brought in illegally. I don’t understand how medical products manufactured with that toxin were officially approved."

Hugel CEO Moon Kyung-yeop said on Tuesday that "As a scientist, I want to ask Medytox CEO and scientist Jung Hyun-ho whether the botox origin is that important,” arguing that key technology does not lie in the toxin itself but the protein purification technology.

Moon said "Botox is a bacterium found in a natural setting, especially in decomposed land or food so that material or manufacturing patent cannot be filed. The protein purification technology to turn this bacterium into a drug varies from company to company and this technology is a proprietary protocol of each manufacturer.”

Moon graduated received a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Seoul National University and served as a research associate professor at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and a research professor at KAIST. Since 2001 when he founded Hugel, he collected 2,000 decay-prone samples and repeated culture and identification processes to find CBFC26, a botox which has high productivity, and he studied optimal protein purification technology and freezing dry technology for five years before his commercial success.

“We submitted all supporting materials for regulatory approval to the MFDS so the issue surrounding the toxin origin is not an essential matter. The toxin brought in from Wisconsin University’s lab also originated from decomposed food or soil and this is a common sense,” Moon added.

By Shin Chan-ok

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