The Moment a New Cancer Treatment Met Its First Patient

IT WASN’T QUITE winter in London yet, but it felt like it on that November day in 2021. There was a break in the rain, but the air was chilly as patients climbed the 13 steps from the damp sidewalk into the warm glow of The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust clinic reception room. It was a big day. The very first patient would receive the first clinical doses of HMBD-001, the first cancer treatment from Hummingbird Bioscience. Piers Ingram, the cofounder and CEO of the company, was nervous, but excited. This was the moment when HMBD-001 would be tested under real clinical constraints, and the Hummingbird Bioscience team would soon learn whether their work could stand up in the clinic.

Ingram and his team at Hummingbird Bioscience, a clinical-stage biotechnology company that raised more than $150 million for developing therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases, had been working on the HMBD-001 drug for years, and researching, at the molecular level, how antibodies can selectively block disease-driving signals. More recently, the team is researching how antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) technologies can deliver drugs directly to diseased tissue while limiting exposure to healthy cells. From their headquarters in Singapore, they are focusing their efforts on cracking some of the hardest unsolved problems in medicine.

The approach was to tackle cancer with “an engineering mindset,” Ingram says, “to take a messy biological question, turn it into testable functional hypotheses, and then build molecules designed around those hypotheses rather than around convention.”

On that day in London, nearly 7,000 miles from where HMBD-001 was developed, the team’s core hypothesis was expanded to clinical testing as qualifying clinical trial patients diagnosed with multiple types of cancer received HMBD-001 by IV infusion, and the medicine reached the human bloodstream for the first time.

The trial focused on tumor types where HER3 signaling is implicated. HER3 is a membrane-bound protein that mediates cell-to-cell communication on growth and division. But when cancer is present, HER3 signaling can act as a pro-cancer driver, contributing to cell proliferation, tumor growth, and resistance to therapy.

The HER3 protein was discovered more than 30 years ago, but HER3 has been a challenging target, and translating HER3 biology into real clinical treatments that benefit patients has proven difficult. That’s because cancer is tricky, and “HER3 biology isn’t a single switch—tumors have multiple ways to activate and adapt,” Ingram says. So to develop a molecule that could block cancer growth by stopping HER3’s signals, the Singapore team asked a more specific question: “Can we engineer an antibody that more effectively suppresses HER3 function and signaling—not just bind the target?”

As those first drops of the infusion trickled down the IV line, HMBD-001 became the first clinical test of that hypothesis.
 

Inside the Lab

Under an umbrella of native rain trees in Singapore Science Park, the research team at Hummingbird Bioscience went to work. Computers hummed as graphs filled the screens. The team used proprietary, graph-based models to formalize different hypotheses and rank which experiments would be most decision-relevant. That workflow fed directly into programs that have progressed into clinical testing and into patients.

They were turning complex biology into testable, mechanistic questions and prioritizing those most likely to matter for potential treatments.

Precision was the key for Hummingbird Bioscience cofounders, Jerome Boyd-Kirkup and Piers Ingram. And Singapore is where they could create it.
 

Through the nation’s SG100K project, which is sequencing 100,000 Singaporean genomes, researchers have already identified more than 98 million genetic variants, more than half previously unknown to science. That is invaluable for identifying the right questions to ask when fighting cancer at the molecular level. Combined with Singapore’s biomedical complexes, which can house the entire R&D ecosystem within a few city blocks, and consistent government funding into research and technology infrastructure since 2000, the nation has created a turnkey environment where startups can be operational in weeks instead of months or years.

Over the past two decades, Singapore has built out a biopharmaceutical hub that places research institutes, clinical partners and advanced manufacturing facilities in close proximity. Companies like Hummingbird Bioscience can build teams, raise capital, and coordinate global operations from a single base on the island. In a nation of fewer than six million people, more than 30 startups across sectors have reached billion-dollar valuations, reflecting a highly concentrated innovation environment for its size. In fact, that size works to its advantage when it comes to moving quickly in the biotech world. The 280-square-mile island is producing category leaders like Hummingbird Bioscience by making the process of building a biotech company as frictionless as possible, so teams can work on the problems that are important to them.

Like, in the case of Hummingbird Bioscience, testing hypotheses for the technology needed to create a molecule capable of targeting cancer cells. Ingram says his team was able to get “much more deliberate about turning a scientific idea into a sequence of decision points” without distraction while working in their headquarters.

Of all the places in the world, Singapore made that focus feasible. “What’s important is that Singapore lets you operate globally while building deep technical capabilities locally—especially if you’re trying to run more than a single program,” he adds.
 

In Singapore Science Park, surrounded by nature, the team has assembled multidisciplinary talent and built end-to-end capabilities that keep discovery and development tightly linked. This speeds up discoveries like HMBD-001 and builds a knowledge bank within the team that grows over time.

Within these facilities, a team has been built so computational thinking, mechanistic biology, and drug development work as one system, instead of handoffs between silos. Here, ideas don’t get lost.

Hummingbird Bioscience is not alone. Global companies such as Resmed, alongside venture-backed startups such as Paratus Sciences, have anchored research and innovation operations in Singapore – leveraging its deep talent base, research infrastructure and ecosystem, and regulatory framework that supports global development.

“We’ve benefited from a strong talent base, research institutes and collaborators, and high- quality infrastructure and services here,” Ingram says. “We’ve also received support from Singapore’s national initiatives and agencies at different stages.”

That broader support extended beyond the laboratory. SG Growth Capital (SGGC), a government-backed investment platform, provides capital, networks, and expertise to support its portfolio companies as they scale regionally and globally while anchoring key operations in Singapore. Through SGGC, Hummingbird Bioscience was connected to key venture capital investors and clinical partners, which led to the first dose of HMBD-001 being tested in London.

SGGC sits within a wider framework designed to attract and anchor ambitious founders like Ingram. Through initiatives such as the Global Founder Programme, Singapore connects experienced founders to capital networks, talent, and markets that help them build and scale global ventures.

Strategic investors like Singapore’s SGGC “helped us execute research milestones and scale responsibly,” Ingram says.

One of those milestones—a pivotal breakthrough in the lab—was achieved when the team prioritized the most important question in cancer treatment decision-making.

The team’s computational modeling identified a specific region of the HER3 protein that they believed was functionally critical—the precise place an antibody would need to bind to alter a tumor’s ability to communicate with other cells and grow, Ingram recalls. The team needed an antibody that could stop that communication. This insight allowed the Singapore science team to generate the antibody they had envisioned, which became HMBD-001.

The team was then able to create a strategy for multicountry clinical setups with regulatory sequencing, administration, documentation, and operations, with everything from transporting medications to recruiting cancer patients who are good candidates for the trial and treatment. Singapore’s ecosystem played an enabling role along the way. Grants from Enterprise Singapore supported the company’s initial growth, while SGInnovate provided a community for knowledge sharing with other startups, and initiatives that helped strengthen its talent pipeline. Being able to create a team and a process that are repeatable and predictable because of Singapore’s support structure for tech companies and the city-state’s connections to other hubs—made it possible to focus on fighting cancer.

This workflow has produced not just one, but multiple molecules that have progressed to clinical drug testing. Hummingbird Bioscience is now developing in the clinic HMBD-501; the next generation of HER3-targeting drugs that could treat cancer at the cellular level.
 

Out Into the World

In the early stages of the HMBD-001 clinical trial, Ingram and his team focused primarily on the drug’s safety and tolerability, as well as building a dataset that could support clear decisions about where the medicine could help patients most. In early clinical evaluations, HMBD-001 has shown encouraging signals, and the trials have expanded beyond London to multiple international sites.

In January, Ingram and team announced that the first patient had been dosed with HMBD-501. The first clinical trial for HMBD-501 is currently recruiting cancer patients in the United States and Australia. Soon, more patients will begin receiving HMBD-501 as it enters clinical testing.

The expansion of HMBD-501 clinical trials is a chance to learn more about one of biology’s biggest problems and how to solve it. But it wouldn’t have been possible if the Hummingbird Bioscience team hadn’t asked the important questions in their lab in Singapore.

In March 2025, Ingram and Boyd-Kirkup launched Callio Therapeutics, a biotechnology company focused on next-generation dual-payload ADCs that target cancer, with headquarters in Singapore and Seattle. Callio Therapeutics, built on ADC technologies licensed from Hummingbird Bioscience, is engineering a single antibody to deliver two drugs in a targeted way to address multiple tumor vulnerabilities. “We’re pushing what we think is possible,” Ingram says. “In the next decade, the work we’re doing at Callio Therapeutics and the work we’re doing now at Hummingbird Bioscience, applying the same concepts to autoimmune diseases, has the potential to have real impact for many patients globally.”

The road to these promising treatments leads from London to Seattle and beyond, but it began in Singapore.

It is here, under the rain trees, that scientists are crossing the threshold from confidence in the lab to testing solutions in the real world, helping patients who are facing cancer. For Ingram, this is “where the work becomes both more meaningful and more demanding.”

Whether you’re building a new venture or scaling a global business, discover how Singapore can be a partner for your international growth: Contact Us