SK Holdings said Monday it is the lead investor in Singapore-based Hummingbird Bioscience’s $6.5 million Series B extension funding round.

Hummingbird Bioscience, founded in 2015 in Singapore by former members of global pharma giant Sanofi, researches for novel antibody drugs. Antibody drugs are immunoproteins that selectively dock on, and attack, malignant proteins that become seeds for tumors and diseases.

Hummingbird Bioscience is specially armed with a platform technology called Rational Antibody Discovery, which predicts the structure of a protein and selects the optimal area for binding -- which can dramatically shorten the length of time spent on research, SK Holdings said.

The Series B funding, $25 million in size, had been so popular that a Series B extension funding the size of $6.5 million took place as an afterthought.

Including the Series B extension that just closed, Hummingbird Bioscience has raised a total capital of more than $65 million to date.

SK Holdings, citing market researcher EvaluatePharma, said that the total biopharma market will grow at an annual average pace of 8 percent, jumping from $243 billion in 2018 to $388 billion in 2024.

The company emphasized that it had only seven months ago invested in another Chinese bioventure, Harbour BioMed, and said that it will continue to strive to set its footprint in the course of the biopharma development.

By Lim Jeong-yeo (kaylalim@heraldcorp.com)