AbbVie's Covid-19 antibody partner wraps $221M Hong Kong IPO
Just a few days after AbbVie went all in on a Covid-19 antibody, its partner has officially wrapped its IPO.

Listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Harbour BioMed has raised $221 million with help from nine cornerstone investors: BlackRock Fund, HBM Healthcare, Hillhouse Capital, Hudson Bay Capital, Octagon Investments, Anlan Fund, Legend Capital, OrbiMed and 3W Capital.
The new injection adds to over $300 million the company — which has offices in both Suzhou, China and Cambridge, MA — has accrued in four years.
With a focus on immunology and oncology, Harbour BioMed has said it will mainly invest the proceeds on three anchor assets: batoclimab, the antibody hitting the neonatal Fc receptor for a range of autoimmune and inflammatory disorders; tanfanercept, a TNF-α drug for dry eye disease; and HBM4003, a CTLA4 inhibitor.
The first two are in registrational trials while the third is just entering the clinic.
But the biggest validation of its antibody discovery platform might have come earlier this year with 47D11, a program originally developed for SARS-CoV-1. Since it targets a region on the spike protein that’s conserved on SARS-CoV-2, CEO Jingsong Wang told Endpoints News, Harbour BioMed, the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center worked together to test it preclinically for the new coronavirus.
AbbVie jumped on board in June, helping boot up a small Phase I trial in the US that started just last week. On Monday the pharma giant exercised its option to license the whole program for development and commercialization.
The fate of the program will test Harbour’s promises to deliver globally competitive next-gen antibody drugs — many of which are aimed at the same targets as established therapies — through a combination of licensing and in-house research.