Hummingbird Bioscience, a Singapore-based precision biotherapeutics company discovering and developing transformative biologic medicines for hard-to-treat diseases, announced on Monday its Trials in Progress poster presentation for HMBD-002, an anti-VISTA antibody, at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting being held 2-6 June 2023 in Chicago.

The poster will summarise the Phase 1 clinical trial design for HMBD-002 (NCT05082610).

The poster describes the Phase 1, open-label, multi-centre, first-in-human trial evaluating HMBD-002 as a monotherapy and in combination with Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA's anti-PD-1 therapy KEYTRUDA(R) (pembrolizumab). The study will be conducted under a clinical trial collaboration and supply agreement with Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA. Monotherapy escalation cohorts 1-4 have been completed without dose-limiting toxicities, and the trial is currently enrolling cohort 5. Combination escalation is projected to begin in the second half of 2023.

'VISTA's complex biology makes it a hard-to-drug target, yet we have shown in our preclinical studies that HMBD-002 has potent anti-tumour activity with its unique mechanism of action. In this poster at ASCO, we will display the progress that HMBD-002 has made in Phase 1 trials,' said Jerome Boyd-Kirkup, Ph.D., Hummingbird Bioscience's chief scientific officer. 'We look forward to discussing longer-term clinical development plans and combination strategies with the wider immuno-oncology community at ASCO.'