Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute

Industry leader Barry Quart, Pharm.D. appointed as Chief Executive Officer succeeding Zheng Wei, Ph.D., who will remain on the Board of Directors and serve as an advisor to assist with the transitionExperienced life science executive David Szekeres appointed as PresidentKleanthis G. Xanthopoulos, Ph.D. appointed as Chair of the Board of Directors SAN DIEGO, CA and TAICANG, China, June 12, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Connect Biopharma Holdings Limited (Nasdaq: CNTB) (Connect or the Company), a U.S.-headquartered, global clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to improving the lives of patients with chronic inflammatory diseases through the development of therapies derived from T cell-driven research, announced today the appointments of Barry Quart, Pharm.D., as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Director, David Szekeres as President, and Kleanthis G. Xanthopoulos, Ph.D., as the new Chair of the Board of Directors (Board). Dr. Xanthopoulos, currently the lead independent member of the Board since 2022, has been appointed Chair of the Board. Dr. Xanthopoulos succeeds Wubin (Bill) Pan, Ph.D., M.B.A., who will remain on the Board and serve as an advisor to the Company during the transition. “On behalf of the board and the Connect team I would like to thank Drs. Zheng Wei and Wubin (Bill) Pan, who co-founded Connect with the vision to bring next-generation therapeutics to patients with inflammatory diseases and improve their lives. We are grateful for their contributions and unwavering commitment to the Connect mission by building an outstanding organization with Phase 3-ready programs and a robust pipeline,” said Kleanthis G. Xanthopoulos, Ph.D., Chair of the Board of Directors of Connect. “The highly differentiated data generated from positive readouts in both asthma and atopic dermatitis for the lead asset, rademikibart, establishes Connect now as a U.S.-driven late-stage company entering its pre-commercial phase. I am thrilled to welcome the new leadership team with such an impressive track record and eager to leverage Barry’s and David’s operational expertise and wealth of experience to unlock the maximum potential/value of rademikibart and the rest of the pipeline.” "Founding and leading Connect with Bill and working with many talented colleagues who are passionate about discovery and development of life-changing medicines in the past 12 years has been a true honor and privilege," said Dr. Zheng Wei. "As Connect evolved to focus on advancing rademikibart, Bill and I look forward to supporting Barry and David as Connect enters an exciting new phase." Dr. Barry Quart, the Company’s newly appointed CEO, brings over 30 years of extensive experience serving in leadership positions in biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies and developing innovative pharmaceutical products. He has personally led several early-stage biotech companies through late-stage clinical development and regulatory strategy, highlighted by nine U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved drugs. “I am honored to assume the CEO role for Connect and to join the Board. I am incredibly excited about the potential of the Company going forward with rademikibart, which I believe to be a best-in-class competitor to dupilumab,” said Barry Quart, Pharm.D., CEO and Director of Connect. “With the multiple innovative therapies in our pipeline, a cash runway into at least 2026, and an expanded management team with proven experience in the U.S., I believe we have all the elements in place to achieve significant shareholder returns in the future.” Dr. Quart was most recently CEO at Heron Therapeutics. He first served as CEO and Director starting in 2012, transitioned to President and CEO in 2019 and was named Chair of the Board in October 2020. At Heron, Dr. Quart oversaw the development and approval of four drugs: two drugs for CINV (CINVANTI® and SUSTOL®) and two acute care drugs (ZYNRELEF® and APONVIE®). Prior to Heron, Dr. Quart co-founded Ardea Biosciences, Inc. in 2006 and served as its President and Chief Executive Officer and Director from its inception through its acquisition by AstraZeneca PLC in 2012. At Ardea, Dr. Quart invented and oversaw the development of a drug for gout (ZURAMPIC®), as well as the design and development of a series of MEK inhibitors for cancer that were licensed to Bayer AG. Dr. Quart currently serves on the Board of Directors of Kiniksa Pharmaceuticals. He is an inventor on 18 U.S. patents and an author on 75 publications and abstracts. Dr. Quart received his Pharm.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. David Szekeres is an experienced life science executive with a proven track record of creating value with deep operational, commercial, corporate development/strategy, and legal expertise. Mr. Szekeres was most recently Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Heron Therapeutics. Prior to Heron, he was the Chief Business Officer and General Counsel of Regulus Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech company focused on RNA therapeutics and the Head of Mergers & Acquisitions at Life Technologies Corporation. Mr. Szekeres also holds positions as the Chair of the Board of GRI Bio, Inc. (Nasdaq: GRI) and is a member of the Board of Directors of CureMatch, Colossal Biosciences, and the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute. He received his J.D. from Duke University School of Law and earned his B.A. at the University of California, Irvine. About Connect Biopharma Holdings Limited Connect Biopharma is a global, clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company applying its expertise in T cell biology and deep knowledge of the drug discovery industry to develop innovative therapies to treat chronic inflammatory diseases with the goal of improving the lives of millions of those affected around the world. The Company is building a rich pipeline of proprietary small molecules and antibodies, using functional T cell assays, to screen and discover potent product candidates against validated immune targets. The Company’s lead product candidate, rademikibart (formerly known as CBP-201), is an antibody designed to target interleukin-4 receptor alpha (IL-4Rα) in development for the treatment of atopic dermatitis and asthma. The Company’s second product candidate, icanbelimod (formerly known as CBP-307), is a modulator of S1P1 T cell receptors and is in development for the treatment of ulcerative colitis (UC). For more information, please visit: https://www.connectbiopharm.com/ Forward-Looking Statements Connect Biopharma cautions that statements included in this press release that are not a description of historical facts are forward-looking statements. Words such as “may”, “could”, “will”, “would”, “should”, “expect”, “plan”, “anticipate”, “believe”, “estimate”, “intend”, “predict”, “seek”, “contemplate”, “look forward”, “potential”, “continue” or “project” or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements include the Company’s plans to advance the development of its product candidates, the timing of achieving any development, regulatory or commercial milestones or reporting data or whether such milestones or data will be achieved or generated, including whether any new drug application will be submitted or accepted and the timing thereof, and the potential of such product candidates, including to achieve any benefit, improvement, differentiation, trend or profile or any product approval or be effective, and the sufficiency of the Company’s cash and investments to support planned operations. The inclusion of forward-looking statements should not be regarded as a representation by Connect Biopharma that any of its plans will be achieved. Actual data may differ materially from those set forth in this release due to the risks and uncertainties inherent in the Company’s business and other risks described in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including the Company’s Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC on April 16, 2024, and its other reports. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof, and Connect Biopharma undertakes no obligation to revise or update this news release to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in Connect Biopharma’s filings with the SEC which are available from the SEC’s website (www.sec.gov) and on Connect Biopharma’s website (www.connectbiopharm.com) under the heading “Investors.” All forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. This caution is made under the safe harbor provisions of Section 21E of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. INVESTOR CONTACT:Tim McCarthyLifeSci Advisorstim@lifesciadvisors.com

Nuclear pore complexes (NPCs) are channels composed of multiple proteins that ferry molecules in and out of the nucleus, regulating many critical cellular functions, such as gene expression, chromatin organization and RNA processes that influence cell survival, proliferation, and differentiation. Nuclear pore complexes (NPCs) are channels composed of multiple proteins that ferry molecules in and out of the nucleus, regulating many critical cellular functions, such as gene expression, chromatin organization and RNA processes that influence cell survival, proliferation, and differentiation. In recent years, new studies, including work by Maximiliano D'Angelo, Ph.D., associate professor in the Cancer Metabolism and Microenvironment Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys, have noted that NPCs in cancer cells are different, but how these alterations contribute to malignancy and tumor development -- or even how NPCs function in normal cells -- is poorly understood. In a new paper, published June 5, 2024 in Science Advances, D'Angelo with first author Valeria Guglielmi, Ph.D., and co-author Davina Lam, uncover Nup358, one of roughly 30 proteins that form the NPCs, as an early player in the development of myeloid cells, blood cells that if not formed or working properly leads to myeloid disorders such as leukemias. The researchers found that when they eliminated Nup358 in a mouse model, the animals experienced a severe loss of mature myeloid cells, a group of critical immune cells responsible for fighting pathogens that are also responsible for several human diseases including cancer. Notably, Nup358 deficient mice showed an abnormal accumulation of early progenitors of myeloid cells referred as myeloid-primed multipotent progenitors (MPPs). "MPPs are one of the earliest precursors of blood cells," said D'Angelo. "They are produced in the bone marrow from hematopoietic stem cells, and they differentiate to generate the different types of blood cells. "There are different populations of MPPs that are responsible for producing specific blood cells and we found that in the absence of Nup358, the MPPs that generate myeloid cells, which include red blood cells and key components of the immune system, get stuck in the differentiation process." Fundamentally, said Gugliemi, Nup358 has a critical function in the early stages of myelopoiesis (the production of myeloid cells). "This is a very important finding because it provides insights into how blood cells develop, and can help to establish how alterations in Nup358 contribute to blood malignancies." The findings fit into D'Angelo's ongoing research to elucidate the critical responsibilities of NPCs in healthy cells and how alterations to them contribute to immune dysfunction and the development and progression of cancer. "Our long-term goal is to develop novel therapies targeting transport machinery like NPCs," said D'Angelo, who recently received a two-year, $300,000 Discovery Grant from the American Cancer Society to advance his work. This research was supported in part by a Research Scholar Grant from the American Cancer Society (RSG-17-148-01), the Department of Defense (grant W81XWH-20-1-0212) and the National Institutes of Health (AI148668).

BETHESDA, Md., April 18, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- What: In a proof-of-concept study, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that uses data from individual cells inside tumors to predict whether a person's cancer will respond to a specific drug. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of NIH, published their work on April 18, 2024, in Nature Cancer, and suggest that such single-cell RNA sequencing data could one day be used to help doctors more precisely match cancer patients with drugs that will be effective for their cancer. Current approaches to matching patients to drugs rely on bulk sequencing of tumor DNA and RNA, which takes an average of all the cells in a tumor sample. However, tumors contain more than one type of cell and in fact can have many different types of subpopulations of cells. Individual cells in these subpopulations are known as clones. Researchers believe these subpopulations of cells may respond differently to specific drugs, which could explain why some patients do not respond to certain drugs or develop resistance to them. In contrast to bulk sequencing, a newer technology known as single-cell RNA sequencing provides much higher resolution data, down to the single-cell level. Using this approach to identify and target individual clones may lead to more lasting drug responses. However, single-cell gene expression data are much more costly to generate than bulk gene expression data and not yet widely available in clinical settings. In the new study, the researchers investigated whether they could use a machine learning technique called transfer learning to train an AI model to predict drug responses using widely available bulk RNA sequencing data but then fine-tune that model using single-cell RNA sequencing data. Using this approach on published cell-line data from large-scale drug screens, the researchers built AI models for 44 Food and Drug Administration–approved cancer drugs. The AI models accurately predicted how individual cells would respond to both single drugs and combinations of drugs. The researchers then tested their approach on published data for 41 patients with multiple myeloma treated with a combination of four drugs, and 33 patients with breast cancer treated with a combination of two drugs. The researchers discovered that if just one clone were resistant to a particular drug, the patient would not respond to that drug, even if all the other clones responded. In addition, the AI model successfully predicted the development of resistance in published data from 24 patients treated with targeted therapies for non-small cell lung cancer. The researchers cautioned that the accuracy of this technique will improve if single-cell RNA sequencing data become more widely available. In the meantime, the researchers have developed a research website and a guide for how to use the AI model, called Personalized Single-Cell Expression-based Planning for Treatments In Oncology (PERCEPTION), with new datasets. This work was conducted by NCI's Center for Cancer Research and led by Alejandro Schaffer, Ph.D., and Sanju Sinha, Ph.D., previously at NCI, now at Sanford Burnham Prebys. Eytan Ruppin, M.D., Ph.D., supervised the work. Who: Eytan Ruppin, M.D., Ph.D., Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute The Study: "Predicting patient response and resistance to treatment from single-cell transcriptomics of their tumors via the PERCEPTION computational pipeline" appears April 18, 2024, in Nature Cancer. About the National Cancer Institute (NCI): NCI leads the National Cancer Program and NIH's efforts to dramatically reduce the prevalence of cancer and improve the lives of people with cancer. NCI supports a wide range of cancer research and training extramurally through grants and contracts. NCI's intramural research program conducts innovative, transdisciplinary basic, translational, clinical, and epidemiological research on the causes of cancer, avenues for prevention, risk prediction, early detection, and treatment, including research at the NIH Clinical Center—the world's largest research hospital. Learn more about the intramural research done in NCI's Center for Cancer Research. For more information about cancer, please visit the NCI website at cancer.gov or call NCI's contact center at 1-800-4-CANCER (1-800-422-6237). About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit nih.gov. SOURCE National Cancer Institute