Caris Life Sciences, a molecular science and technology company actively developing and delivering innovative solutions to revolutionize healthcare, and Hummingbird Bioscience, a data-driven precision biotherapeutics company discovering and developing transformative biologic medicines for hard-to-treat diseases, have entered a strategic collaboration to advance clinical development of Hummingbird Bioscience’s anti-HER3 therapy, HMBD-001.
 
Hummingbird Bioscience, a clinical-stage biotechnology company, uses their proprietary and differentiated technologies to drug clinically-validated targets which have previously been elusive. Their most advanced program, HMBD-001, is a HER3 antibody that uniquely targets an epitope on the critical dimerization interface.
 
HER3 is a member of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) family, known to be important in tumor progression and metastasis. Unlike earlier generations of HER3 antibodies, HMBD-001 blocks both ligand-dependent and ligand-independent signaling, eliciting potent anti-tumor effects. Leveraging Caris’ extensive real-world clinico-genomic database to support clinical trial design, Hummingbird Bioscience will be better able to prospectively identify patients with molecular biomarkers that are potentially associated with response to HMBD-001.
 
“Caris’ partnership with Hummingbird Bioscience aligns with our goal of leveraging molecular and clinical data to power and accelerate the development of precision therapies,” said Brian Lamon, Ph.D., chief business officer at Caris Life Sciences. “Our partnership will help evaluate biomarkers to better understand the clinical utility for this novel therapy, drive patient recruitment and clinical trial access, and may ultimately provide new treatment alternatives and options to patients who are not responding to current therapies.”
 
“With our proprietary technologies, Hummingbird Bioscience discovers and develops unique biotherapeutics against challenging oncology and autoimmune targets. To ensure that these novel therapies succeed, we must conduct intelligent and focused clinical trials on patients who are likely to benefit the most,” said Jerome Boyd-Kirkup, Ph.D., chief scientific officer and co-founder at Hummingbird Bioscience. “As a data-driven company, we understand the value of using large cohorts of molecular and clinical information to gain a deeper understanding of the patients who may respond to this exciting new therapy and track their response. We are excited by the potential of this partnership, and we look forward to better, more efficient clinical development with access to Caris’ vast amount of real-world data and state-of-the-art comprehensive profiling technologies.”
 
Since the launch of its molecular profiling service in 2009, Caris has amassed molecular data on more than 400,000 patients and real-world clinical outcomes on more than 275,000 patients. Caris’ sequencing laboratories allow the company to perform whole exome DNA sequencing and whole transcriptome RNA sequencing on every patient. Caris’ data-driven, molecular insights are changing the landscape of precision medicine with actionable insights from retrospective, epidemiologic and real-time molecular data to enhance research and commercial activities.