Harbour BioMed and Sinopharm Will Establish R&D ‘Innovation Consortium’

Editor’s Take: R&D collaboration in areas such as oncology and immune-mediated inflammatory diseases can often address significant unmet needs.

Harbour BioMed is strategically partnering with China National Pharmaceutical Group, or Sinopharm, on advancing collaborative R&D of innovative biologics.

The Sinopharm—Harbour BioMed Innovation Consortium intends to cover the full R&D lifecycle of such biologics. Its strategic focus will be oncology, immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, and other select therapeutic areas. This aligns with Harbour BioMed’s commitment to discovery and development of novel antibody therapeutics in areas like immunology and oncology.

What Harbour and Sinopharm Will Offer

Harbour BioMed will leverage its proprietary antibody technology platform, Harbour Mice. This generates fully human monoclonal antibodies in both two heavy and two light chain (H2L2) and heavy chain-only (HCAb) formats. HCAb-based immune cell engager bispecific antibody technology allows tumor-killing capacity that Harbour BioMed says traditional therapies cannot achieve.

Additionally, Harbour BioMed will work with Sinopharm on how best to deploy AI-enabled drug discovery capabilities.

For its part, Sinopharm is contributing expertise in clinical development, large-scale manufacturing, and commercialization. Also, Sinopharm takes responsibility for commercial-scale manufacturing process development, clinical trial material production, and product commercialization.

Advancing Innovative R&D

“This represents another important step in advancing our ‘platform + pipeline’ strategy,” Harbour BioMed Chairman/CEO Jingsong Wang, MD, PhD, said. “We look forward to deeply integrating the strengths of our technology platform with Sinopharm’s full-industry-chain capabilities to jointly accelerate R&D.”

“Sinopharm has always placed scientific and technological innovation at the core of its development strategy,” Sinopharm said in a statement. “[We are] accelerating the establishment of a new paradigm that synergizes independent innovation with open collaboration.”

The two parties in this arrangement have agreed to jointly fund R&D activities and, ultimately, share product rights.