Data highlights potential of Hummingbird Bioscience’s dual-payload antibody-drug conjugate platform to improve upon the current generation of ADCs
SAN FRANCISCO and SINGAPORE, May 13, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Hummingbird Bioscience, a precision biotherapeutics company discovering and developing transformative biologics for hard-to-treat diseases, today announced two presentations at the 20th Annual PEGS Boston summit being held from May 13-17, 2024. Data from the first presentation demonstrates the ability to direct antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) to rationally selected epitopes of interest on challenging disease-associated proteins. Data from the second presentation show how a novel dual-payload ADC approach has the potential to address resistance and improve the therapeutic window of ADCs.
“The data presented at PEGS show for the first time how our proprietary fourth generation antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) platform leverages novel linker and dual-payload technologies to overcome the resistance observed with earlier generation single payload ADCs. Our ADC technology has the potential to treat a large number of patients that have either intrinsic or acquired resistance to currently approved ADCs,” said Jerome Boyd-Kirkup, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer, Hummingbird Bioscience. “We will also showcase how our proprietary Rational Antibody Discovery platform engineers immune responses in transgenic mice models so that resulting ADCs and antibodies bind to the key epitopes on disease-associated proteins for optimal drug properties. These data continue to support our belief that our next-generation ADC platform can generate best-in-class ADCs that address payload resistance, optimize tumor specificity, and enhance payload delivery, and therefore maximize the anti-tumor potential of ADCs.”
Presentation details:
Title: Engineering Immune Responses for Epitope-Focused Antibody Discovery
Presenter: Jerome Boyd-Kirkup, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer
Session: Display of Biologics – Novel Platforms
Date/Time: Monday, May 13, 2024, 1:45 p.m. ET
Title: Overcoming Payload Resistance with Dual-Payload ADCs
Presenter: Ben Ayers, DPhil, Vice President, Antibody-Drug Conjugates
Session: Driving Clinical Success in Antibody Drug Conjugates – Novel payloads and MOAs
Date/Time: Friday, May 17, 2024, 9:30 a.m. ET
About Hummingbird Bioscience’s ADC Platform
The 4th generation ADC platform developed by Hummingbird Bioscience aims to address the key limitations in efficacy and safety of current approved ADCs. The ADC platform combines the company’s AI-enabled Rational Antibody Discovery Platform and proprietary linker and dual-payload technologies to unlock the power of dual-payload approaches against the most important disease-associated proteins. The platform engineers potentially best-in-class ADCs that address payload resistance, optimize payload delivery and tumor specificity, and maximize anti-tumor cytotoxic potential.
About Hummingbird Bioscience’s Rational Antibody Discovery Platform
The Rational Antibody Discovery (RAD) platform is designed to address the challenges of traditional antibody approaches. This technology enables the company to identify critical functional regions of a target protein using mAbPredict, a machine learning-enabled technology platform that identifies optimal regions to target, and then drives production of antibodies against these epitopes using mAbHits, a proprietary immuno-engineering technology that directs the antibody response to pre-determined epitopes of interest in the proprietary transgenic HMBD Abvantage mouse. Unlike classical approaches to antibody discovery that have limited control over antibody binding regions, and hence, ability to target optimal epitopes, mAbHits ensures in vivo generation and affinity maturation of antibodies against only the optimal epitope. This systematic and rational approach to antibody discovery opens up the potential of discovering antibodies to specific regions of many important “hard targets” that have not been drugged or are inadequately drugged to date. The RAD platform has produced multiple antibodies and ADCs that effectively target disease-associated proteins, including two antibodies that are currently in Phase I trials (HMBD-001 and HMBD-002) and a recently out-licensed ADC (HMBD-501) that will enter the clinic in 2024.[***]
