Singapore: Hummingbird Bioscience, an innovative biotechnology company focused on the discovery and early development of antibody therapeutics, 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".