Hanmi Pharmaceutical (Korean: 한미약품) is a South Korean pharmaceutical company that is headquartered in Seoul.
Hanmi was founded in 1973 by Lim Sung-ki, who was a pharmacist. Hanmi started selling drugs in China in 1996.
By around 2010, Hanmi's R&D had two areas of interest: developing longer-lasting peptide and protein therapeutics using its "Lapscovery" technology, and developing small molecule tyrosine-kinase inhibitors for cancer and autoimmune diseases. Its strategy was to developmental incremental modifications of existing drugs, create new combination drugs, and to develop novel drugs.
In August 2014 Hanmi exclusively licensed rights in China for poziotinib, a small molecule EGFR inhibitor, to the Chinese company Luye Pharma; in February 2015 Hanmi licensed rights in the rest of the world outside of South Korea to Spectrum Pharmaceuticals.
In March 2015 Hanmi and Lilly signed an exclusive license outside of Asia for Hanmi's small molecule Bruton's tyrosine kinase inhibitor in the field of autoimmune diseases; Lilly paid $50 million upfront and the deal included up to $640 million in milestones and royalties greater than 10%.
In November 2015 Hanmi signed three agreements:
In April 2016 Hanmi announced that it had acquired land near Yantai in the Shandong province of China, where it would build a manufacturing plant and R&D facility; at that time it already had a facility in Beijing. In July Hanmi said it intended to invest more heavily in developing candidate substances of promising new drugs at an early stage in new pharmaceutical and biotech related fields, including through a venture capital firm set up by Sung-ki and colleagues.
In May 2016 the Korean regulatory authority approved olmutinib as a second-line treatment for certain kinds of non-small cell lung cancer.