Hanmi Pharm said it has overhauled its R&D center’s structure to make it a disease-oriented research organization.

The reorganization focuses on maximizing synergies and convergence of expertise by integrating teams previously divided into bio and synthetic areas. The move aims to speed up the development of treatments for diseases with significant unmet medical needs.

Hanmi Pharm will particularly focus on the areas of obesity metabolism, immuno-oncology, and targeted cancer therapy. The company has reorganized its existing departments into preclinical research, clinical trials, anticancer mechanisms, and analytics to improve research efficiency. In addition, it has established a new obesity metabolism team for “HOP,” a new drug development project for obesity metabolism.

Hanmi is developing more than 30 innovative new drug pipelines s in obesity metabolism, rare diseases, and oncology. Among them, the ongoing global phase 2b clinical trial of efinopegdutide, a candidate for MASH (metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis) treatment transferred to MSD in the U.S., is drawing keen attention.

A phase 2 trial of triple therapy efosipegtrutide is being conducted directly by Hanmi Pharm in the U.S. and Korea for MASH patients with liver biopsy-confirmed fibrosis.

BH3120, an immune/targeted anticancer drug based on the double-antibody platform “Pentambody,” originally developed by Beijing Hanmi and later co-developed with Hanmi Pharm, also entered phase I in August. Global clinical development of new immunomodulatory anticancer drugs is expected to begin in earnest next year.

"We decided that collaboration, communication, and healthy competition among researchers with expertise in each field are essential to quickly respond to rapidly changing global technologies in the healthcare sector and create innovations that do not exist in the world," said Choi In-young, head of the R&D Center at Hanmi Pharm. "We expect this reorganization to serve as a solid foundation for making Hanmi a 100-year company through convergence and synergy while breaking down the boundaries between technologies."