Mirae Asset Venture Investment, South Korean VC firm that focusses on investing in enterprises and provides technology and management consulting, has co-invested US$19 million in Series B funding of bioscience startup Hummingbird Bioscience alongside GNTech Venture Capital, the corporate investment arm of Kooksoondang Brewery Co. Ltd..
Existing investors, Heritas Capital and Seeds Capital, as well as new investors, Delian Capital; Mirae Asset Capital; DAValue-GiltEdge; HB Investment; Wooshin Venture Investment; and Kiwoom Investment- Shinhan Capital also participated in the round.
Hummingbird Bioscience is a biotherapeutics company that brings the discovery and development of new precision antibody therapeutics for difficult-to-treat conditions.
The funding will be used to support the discovery of new disease targets that will expand Hummingbird Bioscience’s pipeline of first and best-in-class antibody therapeutics, as well as fueling the work on the co-discovery projects.
According to an official statement from the company, these are part of the multi-target collaboration
agreement signed with Amgen in September this year. Current 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.
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“Our platform is able to accurately identify previously intractable targets, enabling us to engineer antibodies that precisely hit these difficult targets. This approach is demonstrated by our two lead candidates, which are progressing towards clinical trials in partnership with, and with the support from institutions such as Cancer Research UK and Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas. We will continue to execute on rapidly building our pipeline of potential medicines across different disease modalities to help treat and inspire hope for people living with cancer and other conditions,” said Dr. Piers Ingram, Chief Executive Officer, and co-founder, Hummingbird Bioscience.
Jae Joon Kim, Managing Director at Mirae Asset Venture Investment, commented: “Hummingbird Bioscience 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.”
To date, Hummingbird Bioscience has secured more than US$60 million in funding through financing activities and strategic partnerships.
Hummingbird Bioscience is located in Singapore, Houston, Texas and South San Francisco, California.
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