The Experimental Drug Development Centre (EDDC), Singapore’s national platform for drug discovery and development hosted at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), and Hummingbird Bioscience, a clinical-stage biotech company, have entered a three-year partnership to develop novel antibodies for cancer immunotherapy.

The EDDC-Hummingbird partnership will combine Hummingbird’s Rational Antibody Discovery (RAD) platform and EDDC’s proprietary High Throughput Antibody Discovery (HiTAD) platform, to realise the goal of bringing made-in-Singapore innovation to the world.

Hummingbird’s data-driven systems biology platform will be used to systematically identify critical functional regions of a target protein and precisely engineer antibodies to bind to them. This approach overcomes many of the common challenges associated with other approaches to antibody drug discovery which cannot precisely target specific regions on a protein.

EDDC’s HiTAD platform will also be employed to conduct high throughput screening and functional characterisation of antibodies produced by B cells, a type of white blood cell, to identify those with the best potential for development into therapeutics.