韩美药品在ISMB展示AI设计减重增肌候选药HM17321研究

Hanmi Pharmaceutical has secured next-generation drug development technology that uses its own artificial intelligence (AI) platform to predict pharmacological activity based on subtle changes in protein sequences and to propose optimal candidate design directions.
The case draws particular attention as an example of a Korean pharmaceutical and biotech company advancing a "First-in-Class" candidate discovered using AI to the actual clinical stage for global development.
Hanmi Pharmaceutical, the core operating company of Hanmi Science, said on the 24th that it presented research results at the International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB), held in Washington, D.C. from the 12th to the 16th, deriving a muscle-strengthening-based obesity drug pipeline using its own AI platform "HARP-pSAR."
ISMB is the world's largest conference in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology, and an international academic conference leading AI-based drug development research. This year, it focused on cases using AI not merely as a prediction tool but as an actual research collaborator.
Using its AI platform, Hanmi Pharmaceutical derived "HM17321 (LA-UCN2)," the world's first innovative obesity drug targeting both weight loss and muscle gain simultaneously, and is currently conducting Phase 1 clinical trials in the United States. At the American Diabetes Association (ADA) in June, the company also unveiled "HM500197 (LA-MSTN)," the world's first peptide-based next-generation muscle-enhancing treatment with a myostatin inhibition mechanism.
This research drew attention not only for presenting AI's predictive performance, but also for demonstrating that AI-designed protein sequences led to innovative new drugs at the clinical development stage through actual experimental verification and candidate optimization.
Unlike existing GLP-1-class drugs, HM17321 is a UCN2 analog that selectively targets the CRF2 receptor. It is characterized by inducing fat reduction and muscle gain simultaneously, and the key challenge was to optimize the protein sequence so that it binds strongly to the target receptor while not reacting to non-target receptors.
To this end, Hanmi Pharmaceutical utilized its own AI platform "HARP-pSAR (Hanmi AI-driven Research Platform-protein Sequence-Activity Relationship)." Hanmi Pharmaceutical plans to continuously expand HARP-pSAR into an AI-based drug design platform applicable to various targets rather than a single project.
Choi In-young, head of Hanmi Pharmaceutical's Future Growth Division (vice president), said, "This research is a case showing that AI can become a practical research partner that goes beyond simple data analysis to propose directions for new drug candidate design." He added, "It is significant that we introduced results that led to actual clinical development at ISMB, where world-class AI and computational biology researchers gathered."