From May 2024 to May 2025, Junghwan Park's work in the Ministry of Health and Welfare's Health Industry Policy Division focused on turning a collection of strong institutions into a connected biohealth innovation system. The portfolio spanned regional clusters and advanced medical complexes, research hospitals, startup support, talent, global biomanufacturing cooperation, and cross-government strategy. The unifying policy problem was translation: how to move promising science through clinical validation, regulation, financing, manufacturing, and market entry.
One track connected places and institutions. A public–private Bio Cluster Council was launched in May 2024 to link regional clusters and the universities, hospitals, research institutes, and companies within them, while surfacing regulatory barriers. The next phase selected six regional K-Biohealth centers for 2025–2027, using local cluster operators and hospitals as platforms for startup growth. Advanced Medical Complex planning and coordination reinforced the same hub-and-network model rather than treating each region as an isolated site.
A second track strengthened the path from hospital research to commercialization. Regulatory reform enabled research-centered hospitals to establish medical-technology cooperation bodies responsible for R&D contracts, intellectual property, technology transfer, and commercialization. The program then moved from a designation system of ten hospitals to a broader certification model: twenty-one institutions received the first three-year certification in 2025. Open laboratories linked clinicians and hospital infrastructure to startups, while the K-BIC Venture Café and STAR DAY offered recurring access to regulatory expertise, investors, larger companies, and global R&D trends.
Workforce and international cooperation completed the ecosystem. A cross-government guide brought together eighty-one biohealth training programs from nine ministries. Korea's WHO-designated Global Training Hub for Biomanufacturing continued vaccine-production and quality training for participants from low- and middle-income countries, established a dedicated support foundation, and connected this capacity-building work to the World Bio Summit. Domestic recruitment programs, meanwhile, linked biohealth employers with jobseekers as part of the wider talent pipeline.
The period culminated in the January 2025 launch of the National Bio Committee and the Korea Bio Transformation Strategy. That framework brought multiple ministries around a common agenda: connected clusters and regulatory reform; data, computing, and AI-enabled R&D; public manufacturing infrastructure and private finance; supply-chain resilience and biosecurity; and talent. Park's contribution sits across this joined-up portfolio — building mechanisms through which research, care delivery, companies, regions, and government could work as one system.