China Bio Venture Invests in Singapore's 'Hummingbird' After 7 Months
[Asia Economy Reporter Hwang Yoon-joo] SK Inc. is accelerating its entry into the bio sector through investments in antibody drug development companies.
On the 11th, SK Inc. invested in the Singaporean bio venture company 'Hummingbird Bioscience (Hummingbird)' to secure innovative technology for entering the antibody drug market. This comes seven months after investing in the Chinese bio venture 'Harbour BioMed' in October last year.
Antibody drugs are immune proteins in the body that selectively bind to proteins causing diseases and interfere with antigen activity, making them representative bio-pharmaceuticals. They are high-value drugs with fewer side effects and excellent efficacy, actively developed by major pharmaceutical companies.
Hummingbird is a bio venture established in 2015 by experts from the global healthcare company Sanofi to develop innovative antibody drugs. Its headquarters are located in Singapore, with a clinical development center in Houston, USA. SK Inc. participated as a major investor in this investment, which was conducted at a scale of approximately 8 billion KRW.
Hummingbird possesses optimal antibody discovery technology, a core element in antibody drug development, expected to overcome the limitations of existing antibody development. Traditionally, antibody development involved injecting antigens into animals to find optimal antibodies, making it difficult to quickly produce antibodies that selectively bind to specific parts of the antigen.
However, Hummingbird has proprietary antibody discovery technology (RAD platform technology) that predicts protein structures to select the best binding sites for antibodies and binds only to those selected sites. This minimizes trial and error in the drug development process and equips the company with competitiveness to discover optimal drug candidates.
The industry highly values Hummingbird's growth potential. In February last year, the Texas Cancer Prevention Research Institute (CPRIT) in the USA provided research funding of $13 million, and in August of the same year, Cancer Research UK supported the clinical phase 1 costs for Hummingbird's anticancer drug candidates. It is very rare for research institutions to support drug candidates at the clinical stage. In September last year, Hummingbird also signed a joint research agreement worth up to $100 million with the multinational pharmaceutical company Amgen.
Harbour BioMed, in which SK Inc. invested in October last year, is a bio venture established in 2016 by experts from Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson, and Harvard Medical School. It has subsidiaries in Shanghai, China; Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Boston, USA, and is a global company developing antibody drugs for cancer and immune disease treatments. SK Inc. participated jointly in the approximately 90 billion KRW investment in Harbour BioMed along with the Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) and Legend Capital.
With this investment, SK Inc. expects to enter the rapidly growing bio-pharmaceutical market and create synergy with its drug development subsidiary SK Biopharm. An SK Inc. official stated, "We plan to continue various global investments and open innovation initiatives to secure innovative bio and pharmaceutical technologies."
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