● Trast, the Most-Favored Yellow Medicine for Koreans’ Knee Pain for 24 Years

- Released world’s 1st pain patch for arthritis in 1996
- Cumulative sales volume, when being piled up, reaches 2,000 times the height of Mt. Everest ? A representative color marketing case in Korea


Trast, Korea’s popular pain patch for arthritis recently celebrated its 24th anniversary.

SK chemicals announced on the 2nd that Trast, the world’s first pain patch for arthritis celebrated its 24th anniversary since its release in 1996. Trask has become the one and only pain patch for arthritis developed by a Korean pharmaceutical company and has been loved by consumers for 24 years.

Trast by SK chemicals surpassed 1 million sales only three months after its launch and by achieving 10 billion won in sales in the 1st year of release, a first in a domestic pharmaceutical industry, Trast marked the beginning of its long history. For the past 24 years, as many as 183.3 million Trast patches have been sold and if you were to pile all these patches up, they would be as high as 2,000 times the height of Mt. Everest.

Trast＇s core technology is TDDS (Trans-dermal Drug Delivery System), a system independently developed by SK chemicals. Thanks to the state-of-the-art and groundbreaking formulation technology, Trast’s TDDS technology delivers drugs directly to the joint for the 1st time in the world, which propelled favorable comments among patients and doctors.

At that time, one doctor of a large hospital in Korea praised the product by saying, “Trast, the world’s first pain patch for arthritis, uses TDDS technology to directly deliver piroxicam (an anti-inflammatory drug) to the affected area by transmitting the drug through the skin with equal concentration level for 48 hours, sending the drug only to the joint while minimizing the drug’s blood concentration. By doing so, Trast solved side effects to the stomach and entire body, a shortcoming of systemic oral medications. Trast minimizes the side effects by demonstrating an equivalent or even greater efficacy from what we obtain from oral drugs.” (Source: Research material of Samsung Medical Center, 1997)

The biggest merit of Trast has been the “efficacy that lasts 48 hours.” There is a famous story about the naming of the product: since the drug showed long-lasting efficacy (3 days) in actual clinical stage, the product was named “Trast” by combining “TRI” for 3 days and “Last.”

Color marketing has also been very important for the sale of Trast. With the so-called “Yellow Medicine Campaign,” the company promoted Trast as “the yellow medicine” which significantly raised its brand awareness and overpowered the market competitors. Until now, color marketing of Trast has been recognized as one of the most successful marketing cases in the history of Korea’s pharmaceutical industry.

The popularity of Trast knows no bounds: starting from being the Korea’s first drug company to execute a finished product export contract with Italian Rotta, a multinational pharmaceutical company, in 1998, SK chemicals has expanded its market to the Philippines (2002), China (2005), India (2008) and to Saudi Arabia (2011) and sold products with aggressive local marketing. In particular, annual sales of Trasts are now around 10 billion in China where the company entered that market in 2005, making a success case for local marketing of Korean medicine.

The product name of Trast is ‘特樂思特.’ Liu Quanzhi, the head of a Beijing-located drug research institute where conducted Trast’s local clinical tests said, “The secret of clinical success lies in the technology of Trast, the world＇s first arthritis treatment patch,” Dr. Liu also said, “We believe in SK chemicals＇ R&D capabilities and will willingly participate in future projects.”

Jeon Kwang-Hyun, CEO of SK chemicals stated that “we deeply appreciate the love for Trast shown by consumers for the last 24 years. Now that Korea is having the fastest aging society among OECD countries, we will make more efforts to protect the health of patients from arthritis, which is a chronic disease.”

The yellow medicine which has healed the knee pain of arthritis patients for 24 years - Trast’s first domestic release date was February 1, 1996.



* Photo: Trast, the Most-Favored Yellow Medicine for Koreans’ Knee Pain for 24 Years