On November 25, 2021, Handok made a KRW 3 billion equity investment in Spark Biopharma (Park Seung-bum, CEO) and signed a strategic partnership agreement for joint research and development.

This investment is part of Handok’s open innovation initiative and involves more than an equity investment in Spark Biopharma, to include joint research and development of SBP-101 for all cancers. With this contract, Handok has secured domestic product sales and item licenses for SBP-101. In addition, it has priority review rights for joint development and commercialization of therapeutics developed by Spark Biopharma.

Spark Biopharma is a bio-venture founded in 2016 by Park Seung-bum, a professor of Chemistry at Seoul National University. It develops innovative drugs based on low molecular weight compounds and independently-developed new drug development platform technologies: pDOS (privileged-substructure-based Diversity Oriented Synthesis), a library of drug-like low-molecular compounds with molecular diversity; Seoul-Flour, a fluorescent probe technology that selectively detects intracellular disease-related phenotypic changes; and FITGE, a technology that identifies the target protein to understand the mechanism of new drug candidate actions. Utilizing these technologies, the company focuses on R&D related to cancer, immune system diseases, brain and nervous system diseases, and therapeutics for metabolic diseases.

SBP-101, jointly researched and developed by Handok and Spark Biopharma, regulates the immune microenvironment. It is a candidate for immuno-oncology with potential for expansion to a variety of other indications. Studies so far have confirmed the drug’s clear mechanism of action (MoA), safety and effectiveness in fighting cancer. Immunotherapy is a cancer treatment that involves activating the body’s immune system and induces the death of cancer cells, and is known as a ‘third-generation’ anticancer treatment. The immuno-oncology drugs developed so far show excellent efficacy, but have a limitation in that they respond in only 20-30% of patients. In a bid to overcome this, there have been recent active studies in combination therapy, and interest in substances that control the tumor microenvironment, such as SBP-101, is growing as a way to increase the response rate.