The company, one of three Covid-19 vaccine developers in the country, is set to be the first to conduct human trials in the country. It saw its foreign ownership ratio increase by 9.4 percentage points to 25.68 earlier last year after receiving an investment from a group of South Korean companies.

One of the investors was KIS Vietnam Securities Corporation, which said in its financial statement that it had spent nearly VND11.6 billion on purchasing 162,500 shares of Nanogen, giving the company a valuation of VND5.1 trillion.

This was higher than the current market cap of major pharmaceutical Vietnamese companies like Imexpharm (VND3.67 trillion) and Traphaco (VND2.85 trillion).

Nanogen, established in 1997, says on its website that it is a leading researcher and developer of active biopharmaceutical ingredients and specific therapeutic injections in the Asia Pacific region.

It has its chairman Ho Nhan, who grew up in New York and has a PhD in biotechnology. Nhan had accumulated 20 years of experience in biotech research abroad before establishing a company in Vietnam.

Nanogen made headlines in 2010 when Switzerland-headquartered pharmaceutical firm Roche accused it of violating intellectual rights in the production of medicines to treat hepatitis B patients.

Nanogen’s injection cost one-third of the imported medicine at the time, and the company asserted it had not committed any intellectual rights violations.