Closely-held Hummingbird Bioscience raised $19-million in a Series B financing round co-led by Mirae Asset Venture Investment and GNTech Venture Capital.
Existing investors Heritas Capital and Seeds Capital also participated in the round, as did new investors: Delian Capital, Mirae Asset Capital, DAValue-GiltEdge, HB Investment, Wooshin Venture Investment and Kiwoom Investment-Shinhan Capital.
To date, Hummingbird has secured more than $60-million through financing activities and strategic partnerships.
Proceeds of the latest round will support the discovery of new disease targets, expanding Hummingbird’s pipeline of cancer antibody therapeutics, as well as fueling the work on the co-discovery projects that are part of the multi-target collaboration agreement signed with Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN) in September 2019.
Hummingbird’s lead portfolio assets, HMBD-001 and HMBD-002, are expected to enter first-in-human clinical trials following regulatory submissions in the second half of 2020.
“Our novel platform is able to accurately identify previously intractable targets, enabling us to engineer antibodies that precisely hit these difficult targets,” Piers Ingram, co-founder and CEO of Hummingbird, said in a statement.
“This validated approach is demonstrated by our two lead candidates, which are progressing towards clinical trials in partnership with, and with the support from, world-renowned institutions, such as Cancer Research UK and Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas,” Dr. Ingram added.
Jae Joon Kim, managing director with Mirae Asset Venture Investment, said Hummingbird has invented a differentiated rational antibody discovery platform that designs and generates candidate therapeutic antibodies against difficult yet desirable targets. “We are optimistic about the company’s potential to create breakthrough therapies that impact the lives of patients living with serious illnesses,” he added.
