“We will continue to focus on high-value targets in biopharma”
Hummingbird Bioscience, an innovative clinical-stage biotech company with its APAC headquarter in Singapore, with 60 employees is focused on developing precision therapies against hard-to-drug targets via a unique data-driven systems biology approach. On May 18, 2021 it announced the closure of its $125 million Series C financing round. The investment strengthens its competence to solve complex challenges in antibody development to deliver highly differentiated therapies. Proceeds will essentially support advancement of its lead assets in clinical trials and building of its next-generation portfolio of precision biotherapeutics. Speaking with BioSpectrum Asia, Dr Piers Ingram, Co-founder & CEO at Hummingbird Bioscience, Singapore provides additional insights on investment and company’s accelerated clinical development activities. Edited excerpts;
How essential is the progress of precision therapies and hard-to-drug targets in the APAC drug development sector?
The impetus towards precision medicine is driven both by our ever deeper understanding of disease biology, as well as the technological advances that have opened up our ability to both discover and develop such therapies. Significantly improved analytical technologies and data-rich computational approaches have emerged and can now be leveraged in combination at an industrial scale. This has really accelerated the growth and interest in precision medicine over recent years.
Our multidisciplinary approach really sits at the center of this, integrating systems biology and data science to overcome some of the challenges of classical approaches to therapeutics discovery, particularly against ‘hard-to-drug’ targets. Coupling these insights into the biology with biomarker-driven trials, we are able to better identify the population that can benefit from our investigational drugs. These approaches and applications of technology have the potential to deliver cost and time efficiencies in drug development, and significantly improve patient outcomes.
Can you provide your trajectories on capital allocation and deployment?
The $125 million Series C investment will allow us to make rapid progress with the clinical development of our lead oncology programs, as well as continue the investment in our early stage pipeline. We will continue to focus on tackling some of the most challenging and high-value targets in biopharma.
We have joined forces with Cancer Research UK (CRUK), the world’s leading cancer charity, to advance our HER3 program, HMBD-001, into clinical trials. In collaboration with our partners, including Tempus, we are harnessing powerful AI-driven analyses of huge patient data sets to identify biomarkers for detecting patients who are likely to respond best to HMBD-001, including those with cancers that harbor NRG1 fusions. We have also aligned with Novogene in a strategic partnership to expand precision medicine testing for individuals with NRG1-fusion driven cancers in China.
For our anti-VISTA antibody program, HMBD002, we are working with the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) who awarded us a $13.1 million grant to support the Phase IA/B clinical trials of HMBD-002, a potential first-in-class anti-VISTA therapeutic antibody for the treatment of VISTA mediated suppression of anti-tumor immunity in solid tumors and lymphomas that are unresponsive to existing therapies. Funding is also being allocated to the continued development of our oncology portfolio of next-generation antibody assets, including our BCMA-TACI program, HMBD-009.
We also have a co-discovery partnership with Amgen to discover and develop novel therapeutic antibodies in multiple disease indications. This partnership, co-funded by Amgen, will deploy Hummingbird’s proprietary Rational Antibody Discovery platform against multiple challenging and high-value drug targets in drug development.