Hummingbird Bioscience And Sanofi Announce Collaboration For The Development Of Novel Cancer Therapeutics
Hummingbird Bioscience, an innovative biotechnology company focused on the discovery and early development of antibody therapeutics, today announced a collaboration with Sanofi, a global healthcare leader, to develop novel therapeutic antibodies for the treatment of cancer. The collaboration allows Sanofi access to Hummingbird’s proprietary Rational Antibody Development platform, a highly innovative approach to identifying functional antibodies for further development into therapeutics.
Hummingbird Bioscience’s Rational Antibody Development platform is built on two technologies, mAbPredict and mAbHits that were developed by the founding team. By integrating structural, sequence and functional information, mAbPredict allows rapid identification and prioritization of the ideal target regions on a protein, while mAbHits facilitates rapid production of fully human antibodies against these regions. This technology enables Hummingbird to rapidly develop functional antibodies against most classes of proteins.
“We are delighted to work with the Hummingbird team to explore this highly innovative approach to developing therapeutic antibodies which potentially could significantly improve the time and cost of developing new biotherapeutics”, said Dr. Liang Schweizer, Head of Asian Cancer Research at Sanofi. “This agreement underscores the enormous promise of highly novel and systems biology driven approaches for drug discovery and development”.
About Hummingbird Bioscience
Founded in 2014, Hummingbird Bioscience is an innovative Singapore based biotechnology company focused on the discovery and early development of antibody therapeutics, from pre-clinical target validation through to proof-of-concept (typically Phase II clinical trials).
Hummingbird Biosciences seeks to mitigate the risks inherent in drug development by building on advances in systems and computational biology, and deep expertise in this domain. Hummingbird is privately funded and also receives support from SPRING Singapore’s Technology Enterprise Commercialisation Scheme (TECS).
Key assets include an advanced platform for the rational design and development of therapeutic antibodies, novel drug discovery algorithms that can be applied to whole genome datasets to identify high potential drug targets, and a pipeline of projects against novel targets for gastric and liver cancer, including HMBD-001, an antibody against an important target in gastric cancer that is expected to enter clinical trials in 2017, and HMBD-002, an antibody against a novel immune checkpoint inhibitor.
Hummingbird Bioscience’s Rational Antibody Development platform is built on two technologies, mAbPredict and mAbHits that were developed by the founding team. By integrating structural, sequence and functional information, mAbPredict allows rapid identification and prioritization of the ideal target regions on a protein, while mAbHits facilitates rapid production of fully human antibodies against these regions. This technology enables Hummingbird to rapidly develop functional antibodies against most classes of proteins.
“We are delighted to work with the Hummingbird team to explore this highly innovative approach to developing therapeutic antibodies which potentially could significantly improve the time and cost of developing new biotherapeutics”, said Dr. Liang Schweizer, Head of Asian Cancer Research at Sanofi. “This agreement underscores the enormous promise of highly novel and systems biology driven approaches for drug discovery and development”.
About Hummingbird Bioscience
Founded in 2014, Hummingbird Bioscience is an innovative Singapore based biotechnology company focused on the discovery and early development of antibody therapeutics, from pre-clinical target validation through to proof-of-concept (typically Phase II clinical trials).
Hummingbird Biosciences seeks to mitigate the risks inherent in drug development by building on advances in systems and computational biology, and deep expertise in this domain. Hummingbird is privately funded and also receives support from SPRING Singapore’s Technology Enterprise Commercialisation Scheme (TECS).
Key assets include an advanced platform for the rational design and development of therapeutic antibodies, novel drug discovery algorithms that can be applied to whole genome datasets to identify high potential drug targets, and a pipeline of projects against novel targets for gastric and liver cancer, including HMBD-001, an antibody against an important target in gastric cancer that is expected to enter clinical trials in 2017, and HMBD-002, an antibody against a novel immune checkpoint inhibitor.