LYON, France and CAMBRIDGE, Mass. , March 16, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ERYTECH Pharma (Nasdaq & Euronext: ERYP),a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing innovative therapies by encapsulating therapeutic drug substances inside red blood cells, today announced the appointment of Melanie Rolli, M.D., to its Board of Directors and the intention to propose the ratification of her appointment at ERYTECHs next General Meeting of Shareholders. Dr. Rolli has more than 15 years of experience in the global biopharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, including in both Europe and the United States. Dr. Rollis appointment follows the resignation of Allene Diaz, who resigned from the Board effective September 30, 2019.

We are very pleased to welcome Melanie to our Board of Directors, commented Dr Jean-Paul Kress, Chairman of the Board of ERYTECH Pharma.We look forward to working with her to develop ERYTECHs business plans and strategy as ERYTECH advances its late-stage clinical programs and begins preparations for its transition into a commercial-stage company.

I am delighted to be joining ERYTECHs Board of Directors, said Dr. Rolli. It is an exciting time for ERYTECH as its lead product eryaspase is progressing through a pivotal Phase 3 clinical trial in one of the largest unmet medical needs in oncology. I look forward to working closely with the Board and leadership team in supporting the Companys plans.

Dr. Rolli currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of PIQUR Therapeutics AG, a Basel, Switzerland-based clinical stage biotechology company dedicated to drug development of targeted therapies in various oncological and dermatological indications. Previously, she was at Novartis Pharmaceuticals AG for 14 years, where she held positions of increasing responsibilities across the Drug Development, Safety, and Medical Affairs functions. At Novartis, she spent eight years in the United States in global and local positions as the Medical Director in Primary Care, Respiratory, Womens Health and Dermatology and Oncology franchises.

Prior to joining Novartis, she worked as a post-doctoral cancer research physician at SCRIPPS Research Institute for Molecular and Experimental Medicine in La Jolla, California, and as a clinicial and researcher in Germany.

Dr. Rolli graduated from the University of Heidelberg with a doctorate in medicine and pharmacology.

About ERYTECH and eryaspase: http://www.erytech.com

ERYTECH is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing innovative red blood cell-based therapeutics for severe forms of cancer and orphan diseases. Leveraging its proprietary ERYCAPS platform, which uses a novel technology to encapsulate drug substances inside red blood cells, ERYTECH is developing a pipeline of product candidates for patients with high unmet medical needs. ERYTECHs primary focus is on the development of product candidates that target the altered metabolism of cancer cells by depriving them of amino acids necessary for their growth and survival.

The Companys lead product candidate, eryaspase, which consists of L-asparaginase encapsulated inside donor-derived red blood cells, targets the cancer cells altered asparagine and glutamine metabolism. Eryaspase is in Phase 3 clinical development for the treatment of second-line pancreatic cancer and in Phase 2 for the treatment of first-line triple-negative breast cancer. An investigator-sponsored Phase 2 study in second-line acute lymphoblastic leukemia is ongoing in the Nordic countries of Europe.

ERYTECH produces its product candidates for treatment of patients in Europe at its GMP-approved manufacturing site in Lyon, France, and for patients in the United States at its recently opened GMP manufacturing site in Princeton, New Jersey, USA.

ERYTECH is listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market in the United States (ticker: ERYP) and on the Euronext regulated market in Paris (ISIN code: FR0011471135, ticker: ERYP). ERYTECH is part of the CAC Healthcare, CAC Pharma & Bio, CAC Mid & Small, CAC All Tradable, EnterNext PEA-PME 150 and Next Biotech indexes.

Forward-looking information

This press release contains forward-looking statements with respect to the clinical development plans of eryaspase, including ERYTECHs plans for transition into a commercial-stage company. Certain of these statements, forecasts and estimates can be recognized by the use of words such as, without limitation, believes, anticipates, expects, intends, plans, seeks, estimates, may, will and continue and similar expressions. All statements contained in this press release other than statements of historical facts are forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements regarding the ERYTECHs business strategy including its clinical development of eryaspase; the status of the TRYbeCA1 trial including the timeline for patient enrollment, expansion of trial into the United States and intended activities with respect to the interim analysis; the potential of ERYTECHs product pipeline; the timing of ERYTECHs preclinical studies and clinical trials and announcements of data from those studies and trials; ERYTECHs anticipated manufacturing capacity and ability to meet future demand and ERYTECHs anticipated cash runway and sufficiency of cash resources. Such statements, forecasts and estimates are based on various assumptions and assessments of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which were deemed reasonable when made but may or may not prove to be correct. Actual events are difficult to predict and may depend upon factors that are beyond ERYTECH's control. There can be no guarantees with respect to pipeline product candidates that the candidates will receive the necessary regulatory approvals or that they will prove to be commercially successful. Therefore, actual results may turn out to be materially different from the anticipated future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such statements, forecasts and estimates. Further description of these risks, uncertainties and other risks can be found in the Companys regulatory filings with the French Autorit des Marchs Financiers (AMF), the Companys Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and reports, including in the Companys 2018 Document de Rfrence filed with the AMF in March 2019 and in the Companys Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC on March 29, 2019 and future filings and reports by the Company. Given these uncertainties, no representations are made as to the accuracy or fairness of such forward-looking statements, forecasts and estimates. Furthermore, forward-looking statements, forecasts and estimates only speak as of the date of this press release. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any of these forward-looking statements. ERYTECH disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statement, forecast or estimates to reflect any change in ERYTECHs expectations with regard thereto, or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement, forecast or estimate is based, except to the extent required by law.

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ERYTECH Announces the Appointment of Dr. Melanie Rolli to its Board of Directors - BioSpace

In the absence of vaccines or antiviral drugs, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore say the key to slowing and treating the coronavirus might be hidden in the blood of those whove already recovered from the disease.

The method of using convalescent serum essentially harvesting virus-fighting antibodies from the blood of previously infected patients dates back more than a century, but has not been used widely in the United States in decades.

During the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, scientists reported that transfusions of blood products obtained from survivors led to a 50 percent drop in deaths among severely ill patients. A similar strategy was used to treat and slow the spread of polio and measles outbreaks decades ago, but the technique fell out of favor in the 1950s with the innovation of modern vaccine science and antiviral drugs, said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, chair of the molecular microbiology and immunology department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

When Casadevall learned in December that a new coronavirus was spreading rapidly in China, he started telling colleagues that it might be time to revive the antiquated treatment.

Im an infectious disease doctor who is interested in history, Casadevall said. I knew the history of what was done in the early 20th century with epidemics. They didnt have vaccines then, they didnt have any drugs then just like the situation we face now. But physicians then knew that, for certain conditions, you could take the blood of the immune and use it to prevent disease or treat those who became ill.

In a paper published Friday in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Casadevall and a colleague, Dr. Liise-anne Pirofski, argued that collecting blood serum or plasma from previously infected people might be the best hope for treating severe cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, at least until a better treatment can be developed.

Theres some evidence from recent history that suggests the approach could work.

In 2003, doctors in China used plasma from recovered patients to treat 80 people suffering from the viral disease known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS an earlier coronavirus and found that the treatments were associated with improved outcomes and shorter hospital stays. In 2014, the World Health Organization published guidelines for using donated plasma to treat people infected with Ebola after the treatments showed promise.

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In an interview with Stat News last month, a top Food and Drug Administration official said convalescent plasma might be helpful in the fight against the new coronavirus. Although the treatment is not a cure, Casadevall says it might be an important stopgap.

Researchers in the U.S. and across the globe have been scrambling to develop drugs for the coronavirus, but federal officials say those treatments are likely months or in the case of a vaccine more than a year away. That leaves hospitals with few options other than ventilators to treat COVID-19 patients suffering from respiratory failure, stoking concerns nationally that a surge of severely ill patients in the coming weeks could overwhelm emergency rooms and intensive care units.

The approach definitely has merit, and whats remarkable about it is its not a new idea; its been with us for a good hundred years or longer, said Dr. Jeffrey Henderson, an assistant professor of medicine and molecular microbiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. I think we dont know until we have experience and case reports with this particular disease whether it will be effective, but just based on its track record with a number of other viruses, I think it has a very good chance of working.

Henderson said part of what makes the treatment attractive is its simplicity. Although there is danger in giving a patient the wrong type of blood, safety advancements over the past two decades have made adverse outcomes rare. And hospitals have the tools needed to begin harvesting and transfusing patients with blood serum right away, he said.

The Johns Hopkins team is planning to submit its plan for approval by the FDA, but Casadevall said they dont anticipate problems since the method has been used in the past and relies on standard blood-banking technology. He hopes to begin collecting serum from recovered patients within four to six weeks.

Patients tend to make large numbers of antibodies against an infecting pathogen, and these antibodies often circulate in the blood of survivors for months or years afterward. By collecting and transfusing a survivors serum or plasma the liquid portion of blood left once cells and platelets have been removed doctors could potentially boost an ailing patient's immune response, Casadevall said.

Doctors in China have begun treating COVID-19 patients with plasma harvested from survivors and have reported somewhat positive results, especially when the method is applied early in the disease, though it has not been tested widely.

The usage of plasma will probably reduce the time needed to treat the disease from five to 10 days to three to five days, said Dr. Zhang Wenhong, the leader of a medical team sent from Shanghai to Wuhan to help tackle the outbreak, in an interview with Al-Jazeera last week.

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Casadevall argues that convalescent serum could also be given to front-line health care workers to help protect them from becoming ill.

To implement his plan, academic hospitals would need to work collaboratively with blood banks to set up research protocols and treatment guidelines. Doctors at Johns Hopkins started that work weeks ago, Casadevall said, and they have begun drafting guidelines that can be copied by hospitals across the country.

Hes already been in touch with doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, he said.

At the local level, hospitals and blood banks have everything they need to do this, Casadevall said. But what would really help is coordination from the federal government.

First, Casadevall said, the U.S. must immediately begin widespread testing, because its impossible to collect blood serum from survivors if public health officials dont know whos been infected. Second, Casadevall said federal officials may need to oversee the interstate shipment of blood products. He can imagine a scenario where blood banks in Seattle, which has been at the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak for weeks, might be in a position to send excess blood products to other cities where outbreaks are still ramping up.

And finally, Casadevall said, government officials would need to help spread the word. He believes people whove had the coronavirus and recovered will be eager to donate plasma if they believe it could help elderly patients and health care workers.

This is by no means a panacea, Casadevall said. But at a time when the message has been, Theres nothing you can do but wash your hands, this is an opportunity to do something proactive that can help fight this.

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Doctors push for treatment of coronavirus with blood from recovered patients - NBCNews.com

The researchers involved in isolating the virus: Dr. Rob Kozak and Dr. Samira Mubareka of the University of Toronto, and Dr. Arinjay Banerjee of McMaster University.

handout/Sunnybrook Hospital

Two teams of Canadian scientists have isolated the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and successfully reproduced it in the laboratory.

The accomplishment means that researchers who are looking to test screening methods, therapies and vaccines now have Canadian sources that can provide access to the global pathogen without them having to undertake the complicating step of shipping live virus across international borders.

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The significance for us is that it serves as a tool," said Samira Mubareka, a microbiologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto and member of one of the teams. Now that we have this virus in hand it means that we have material for a number of things."

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Dr. Mubareka and her colleagues at McMaster University in Hamilton and the University of Toronto worked in a facility in the Toronto area with the appropriate containment level to handle the new coronavirus safely. They announced their feat on Thursday.

On Friday, Paul Hodgson, associate director of business development at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization-International Vaccine Centre in Saskatoon, confirmed to The Globe and Mail that the joint federal-provincial facility had quietly reached the same milestone a few weeks earlier and is now using its version of the virus for a vaccine development effort.

Samples of the Saskatoon-derived version of the coronavirus are now available for approved research groups through the National Microbiological Laboratory in Winnipeg. The Ontario group also plans to generate its version for distribution.

The spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 continues, with more cases diagnosed in Canada. The Globe offers the dos and don'ts to help slow or stop the spread of the virus in your community.

In both cases, the virus was isolated from clinical samples obtained from patients at Sunnybrook, the first hospital in Canada to treat someone with COVID-19. However, the Toronto and Saskatoon isolates are from different patients and so may vary in ways that will be important for scientists looking to detect or target the virus.

They are also different from a version of the virus isolated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and documented in a paper posted online last week. That version is intended to be the reference strain for scientists working in the United States.

I think having multiple virus isolates is incredibly valuable, Dr. Hodgson said. We can see whether one vaccine or therapy works across all the virus strains ... if there are known [genetic] variations.

Dr. Mubareka said that for the Ontario-based team, the process of isolating the virus began with a relatively standard procedure that did not work the first time. Hurdles along the way had to be surmounted with some additional scientific tricks. The group ultimately succeeded in getting the virus to reproduce in animal cells that were engineered to have no immune response and specially treated to enhance the likelihood of infection.

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The first sign that the method was working surfaced when the group spotted plaques in their cell cultures patches of dead cells that were destroyed by the virus.

We did the infection from clinical specimens on a Friday, said Arinjay Banerjee, a postdoctoral researcher at McMaster Universitys Institute for Infection Disease Research. Then to go back on Monday and see all [the] cells dead that was pretty exciting. That was step one.

Dr. Mubareka said that one of the first uses for the isolate would be to act as a control to make sure that tests used by health-care workers to identify the virus are performing as expected. It could also serve as a challenge strain for antiviral drugs and vaccines currently in development.

Karen Mossman, a professor of pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster, said that researchers there would be working with the isolates to better understand details about the biology of COVID-19, including how the virus works to counteract the human immune response.

She added that there was a certain irony in trying so hard to create a virus that everyone else is trying to get rid of.

Dr. Hodgson said the virus isolated in Saskatoon has now been used to establish the virus in ferrets that can be used to test the efficacy of vaccines in living organisms before human clinical trials commence.

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Last week, the western facility received a $1-million grant to advance its work as part of a funding competition organized by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, which selected 47 teams working on various aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Ontario collaboration was not among the winners and, until now, a lack of funding has been the teams biggest challenge, Dr. Mubareka said.

On Friday, the federal agency said it would be able to support 49 additional projects with a portion of the $1.1-billion COVID-19 response package announced earlier in the week by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Among them is a proposal by Dr. Mossmans group at McMaster to study the biology of how the virus interacts with its hosts and to model this interaction in laboratory experiments

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Two Canadian teams of scientists isolate coronavirus to speed research effort - The Globe and Mail

Henry Ford Health System plans to rapidly expand its life-extending precision medicine program in Detroit after the Jeffries family pledged $25 million to create a specialized center.

The $25 million donation, provided by developer Chris Jeffries and his wife, Lisa, is the largest single gift from individuals in Henry Ford's 105-year history and one of the largest in the nation for a precision medicine program, Henry Ford officials said.

"We are incredibly grateful to Lisa and Chris Jeffries for their generosity," Wright Lassiter III, president and CEO of Henry Ford Health System, said in a statement. "We are experiencing a momentous era in medicine, a radical shift from the traditional approach to cancer care. This gift will help us consolidate and advance our collective efforts to create unprecedented access to advanced, highly personalized treatments for our patients and members."

But in the past three months, precision medicine or precision health, as neurosurgeon Steven Kalkanis, M.D., CEO of the Henry Ford Medical Group, likes to call it is now available for a whole host of new treatments besides those for cancer.

"Hot off the press. There have been animal studies and now clinical studies, only in the last several months, where precision health is ready for prime time and for human beings," said Kalkanis, who also is Henry Ford's chief academic officer.

Over the past decade, precision medicine has been evolving as a new type of medical care that initially focused on treating patients with various forms of cancer, including brain, lung, colon and pancreatic. It works like this: By analyzing patients' own molecular profile and the genetic mutations of their tumors, doctors are able to use the information to develop personalized treatments that could be more effective than standard care.

Doctors are now using precision medicine approaches to treat many other conditions, including cystic fibrosis, asthma, depression, heart disease, autoimmune diseases and multiple sclerosis, Kalkanis said.

"We have a whole era opening up to treat a host of other chronic diseases, using precision medicine to identify patients' molecular profiles, but potentially using existing drugs for everything from asthma to high blood pressure to depression," Kalkanis said. "However, the majority (of precision medicine) is still about designing a tailored drug regimen for individual patients."

Kalkanis said patients with some chronic conditions will one day soon be able to take a blood test and have their molecular profile entered into a database of existing drugs that may be able to match to an existing drug or to new ones being created in real time.

"We have found, in one of our clinical trials, that a (patient had a) rare type of brain cancer with a mutation impacting glucose levels. We used an existing diabetes drug and the patient went into remission," Kalkanis said.

Why the Jeffries donated

Chris Jeffries' father, Gerald was diagnosed with a highly malignant brain tumor in 2001.

Treated initially by neuro-oncologist Tom Mikkelsen and later Kalkanis and the Hermelin Brain Tumor Center team, Gerald was given only nine to 11 months to live, but using a precision medicine approach, he lived another five years until he died in December 2006.

"That meant so much to us. It's impossible to describe," Chris Jeffries said in a statement. Lisa Jeffries also lost her stepfather to cancer.

A native of Flint, Chris Jeffries is co-founder of Millennium Partners, a real estate development company that specializes in mixed-use, urban living and entertainment centers in Boston; San Francisco; Miami; Washington D.C.; Los Angeles; and New York.

Last year, the Jeffries donated $33 million to the University of Michigan Law School, where Chris was a 1974 graduate. The donation is earmarked for student support, including scholarships and other forms of financial aid, summer funding programs, and debt management. It was the largest private donation to the law school in its history, UM said.

Kalkanis said Gerald Jeffries was one of the first cohorts of patients in Henry Ford's personalized medicine program long before it was called precision medicine, in the early 2000s.

"He was enrolled in a clinical trial at Henry Ford 10 to 15 years ago and treated with a novel drug based on his unique cancer characteristics," Kalkanis said. "Because of that, he lived way beyond his life expectancy. The family was very supportive of our program and especially wanted to provide this same hope to others once they learned of the enhanced capability of precision medicine."

Since Gerald Jeffries was treated and Henry Ford developed its precision medicine approach, Kalkanis said there have been a number of patients who have outlived their prognoses. He said doctors can now give patients and families more hope than ever.

"We went through the precision medicine protocol, based on his own unique biomarkers and using a novel drug," he said. "Today these tests have become much more accessible. (For instance), a decade ago, it cost $5,000 (for testing). Now it costs several hundred for the tests" that can lead to the novel, personalized treatment.

Henry Ford's precision medicine program

For years, Henry Ford has been at the forefront of the precision medicine revolution, making world-class, targeted cancer treatments available at its national destination referral center, the Henry Ford Cancer Institute, officials said.

"By analyzing genetic and non-genetic factors, we can gain a better understanding of how a disease forms, progresses and can be treated in a specific patient," Mikkelsen, who is Henry Ford's medical director of the Precision Medicine Program and Clinical Trials Office, said in a statement.

"As of now, we can check for more than 500 genomic markers, which helps us understand the pattern of changes in a patient's tumor cells that influence how cancer grows and spreads," Mikkelsen said. "I'm confident this gift will lead to advancements that provide hope for patients with even the most complex diagnoses."

Kalkanis said the $25 million donation, which is expected to be received over the next several years, will enable Henry Ford to do a number of things.

"It takes investment to build out our biodepository with tissue samples, test them, look for biomarkers and see if (patients are) eligible for certain drugs," Kalkanis said. "We need to design our lab platform that is FDA-approved and recruit the best and brightest scientists and clinicians (specializing in) other cancer types."

Based on the current projection of about four to five chronic diseases and about 10 subspecialties that can be addressed by precision medicine, Kalkanis estimated Henry Ford will recruit two to three scientists and clinicians each year for the next few years.

"We are launching the search process for key researchers and working with the lab and pathology group for tests this calendar year," he said. "We should be up and running over the next year."

Adnan Munkarah, M.D., Henry Ford's executive vice president and chief clinical officer, said taking research in the lab and translating it to patient care is a standard process at Henry Ford.

"(It) is a critical element to help us treat many of the most challenging conditions our patients face," Munkarah said in a statement. "Translational research is bench-to-bedside, meaning it allows patients to benefit from discoveries in real time. That is an essential part of our history and commitment to medicine and academics not only offering the latest innovations in medicine, but also playing a leading role in their development."

Precision medicine is an approach to patient care that allows doctors to select treatments most likely to help patients based on a genetic understanding of their disease.

"The support of our donors is the fuel behind our clinical innovations and the breakthroughs that are improving people's lives," Mary Jane Vogt, Henry Ford's senior vice president and chief development officer, said in a statement. "It is remarkable to work with donors who believe in a better tomorrow and the power of a unified approach to medicine."

The Jeffrieses said they believe Henry Ford will achieve transformational advancements in cancer treatment using precision medicine and personalized treatments.

"The team at Henry Ford is second to none," said Chris Jeffries. "We believe this gift will lead to other families having more time together, as I had with my father. Defeating cancer requires a concerted effort from everyone and we hope to make as big an impact on that goal as possible."

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Henry Ford to expand precision medicine program with help of $25 million donation - ModernHealthcare.com

In the race to develop a treatment for the rapidly spreading illness Covid-19, dozens of drugs are being tested around the world. Its an urgent mission because the latest data suggests that some 20 percent of people infected have serious illness, and around 1 percent may die.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Congress on Wednesday that Covid-19 is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.

The danger stems from the pathogen itself: a virus called SARS-CoV-2.

Teeny tiny viruses are one of the biggest threats that humanity has ever faced. They are behind some of the most devastating pandemics ever known. Even with all of modern medicine, we have only eradicated one virus, smallpox, which required a decades-long global mass vaccination effort.

SARS-CoV-2, the brand new foe, is spreading fast even as entire countries, like Italy, are locking down to prevent its transmission. Estimates of its potential impact vary, but Brian Monahan, the attending physician of the US Congress, told lawmakers Wednesday he expects between 70 million and 150 million people in the US to get infected with the virus over time.

Right now, doctors are using general treatment measures to control the symptoms of Covid-19, but theres not yet a specific vaccine or cure.

Several factors make viruses like SARS-CoV-2 a particularly pernicious threat to humans. The good news is scientists have learned more about how they attack. Theyve also come up with ways to keep some of the deadliest of these tiny germs in check and are slowly inching toward cures. The question now is whether that research will bear fruit in time to blunt the blow of the Covid-19 pandemic and help us get ahead of the next outbreak.

Viruses are the most bizarre germs. Using just a handful of molecules, they assemble into all kinds of tiny shapes, and with just a small set of instructions, they can wreak havoc across entire ecosystems and threaten crop harvests. They can travel between hosts through the air, water, soil, and droplets. They mutate rapidly. And they are truly everywhere, from the oceans to the skies.

Compared to infectious agents like bacteria and fungi, viruses are much smaller and simpler. In fact, viruses can even make other germs sick. Yet theyre so simple that most scientists dont even consider them to be living organisms.

For instance, the poliovirus is just 30 nanometers wide. The SARS-CoV-2 virus behind Covid-19 is about 120 nanometers. Meanwhile, the E. coli bacterium is more than 16 times larger than SARS-CoV-2, and the human red blood cell is 64 times larger. A human cell uses 20,000 different types of proteins. HIV uses just 15. SARS-CoV-2 uses 33.

With all that extra space, larger pathogens like bacteria store the molecular tools they need to make copies of themselves and to fight off infections of their own. These tools are also what make bacteria vulnerable to antibiotics, drugs that interfere with molecular mechanisms in bacteria but not those of human cells, so they have a targeted effect.

But antibiotics dont work on viruses. Thats because viruses dont reproduce on their own. Rather, they invade cells and hijack their hosts machinery to make copies of themselves.

Bacteria are very different from us, so theres a lot of different targets for drugs. Viruses replicate in cells, so they use a lot of the same mechanisms that our cells do, said Diane Griffin, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. So its been harder to find drugs that target the virus but dont damage the cell as well.

Theres also a huge variety of viruses, and they mutate quickly, so tailored treatments and vaccines against a virus can lose effectiveness over time.

Another factor that makes viruses so difficult to treat is how our bodies respond to them. Once the immune system detects a virus, it makes antibodies. These are proteins that attach to a virus or a virus-infected cell, marking it for destruction or preventing it from infecting new cells.

The problem is that a virus can cause a lot of damage and infect other people before the immune system readies its defenses. When those defenses kick in, they can cause other problems like fever and inflammation. And by the time these symptoms show up, the virus may already be in decline, or it may be too late to act.

Often at the time that virus diseases present themselves, its fairly far into the replication of that virus in that person, Griffin said. Many symptoms of the virus disease are actually manifestations of the immune response to the disease, so often things are sort of starting to get better at the time that you actually even figure out somebody has a virus infection.

Researchers use two broad strategies to combat viral infections: slowing down the damage from the virus, and speeding up and strengthening the bodys countermeasures.

Antiviral drugs are one approach to slowing down viruses. Like antibiotics, these are drugs that hamper the virus without causing much collateral damage. The majority of antivirals are targeting the viruses [themselves]. That means the components of the viruses, the viral enzymes, the surface proteins, said Pei-Yong Shi, a biochemistry and molecular biology professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch. By attacking different parts of the virus, antiviral compounds can prevent a virus from entering cells or they can interfere with its reproduction.

For example, remdesivir, under development by Gilead Sciences, is being studied as a way to treat Covid-19. It works by blocking the SARS-CoV-2 virus from copying its genetic material, RNA, the instructions the virus uses to replicate itself. Remdesivir resembles a component of RNA, but when its taken up by the virus, it causes the copying process to stop. Crucially, remdesivir fools the virus, but not human cells.

Protease inhibitors are another class of antiviral drugs, like lopinavir and ritonavir used to treat HIV (the -vir suffix is used to denote an antiviral drug, similar to how -cillin denotes an antibiotic). These compounds block an enzyme in the virus that normally trims proteins down, allowing the virus to infect other cells. When the enzyme is blocked, the virus doesnt mature properly, rendering it inert.

Researchers are also studying how to use antibodies to a given virus collected from engineered animals or from people previously infected with the same virus. By administering antibodies as a treatment, the recipients immune system can get a head start on identifying and eliminating the viral threat rather than waiting to build up its own antibodies.

There are also drugs like interferons that trigger a general immune response. These are a series of signaling molecules that make cells in the body more resistant to infection, inhibiting the spread of a virus while the rest of the immune system catches up. Its mainly used to control persistent infections like hepatitis B.

But interferons can have severe side effects like inflammation, so it requires fine-tuning to treat a virus without doing more harm than good. Doctors have used interferon with other antiviral drugs to treat Covid-19 in China and researchers are investigating this approach as another potential therapy.

Doctors can also use a number of different therapies to limit the immune systems response to viruses, like fever and inflammation, which can sometimes cause more damage to a patient than the virus itself. Anti-inflammatory drugs like corticosteroids and chloroquine are often used to lessen these symptoms.

And there are also vaccines for some viruses and efforts to develop new ones. These are treatments that coach the immune system to detect and fight off a virus before an infection takes place. These are powerful tools for controlling viruses across an entire population, but theyre tricky to optimize for a rapidly changing pathogen, and they require extensive, time-consuming testing to ensure they are safe for a wide segment of the population.

However, even if effective treatments enter the market, the virus will likely remain a threat. As weve learned with influenza (another respiratory disease caused by viruses), despite updated vaccines, new treatments, and a long history of public health responses, there are still between 12,000 and 60,000 flu deaths each year in the US. Covid-19 could remain a persistent threat, too.

To be clear, the best way to fight a virus is to prevent infections in the first place. And that depends on public health measures during an outbreak, like quarantines and social distancing, as well as personal tactics like robust, 20-second hand-washing with soap.

While there is a large and growing body of research on drugs to control viruses, they are still few and far between. We dont have that many antiviral drugs for acute infections, Griffin said. You often dont have any choice except to let it run its course.

Developing new drugs can take years of testing, and by then, an outbreak may have faded, or another more threatening pathogen may have emerged. Even viruses for which we do have antiviral drugs, like influenza, the illness often isnt detected in time to make it worth the treatment.

Other viruses like HIV can be controlled with drugs, but not eliminated, as hidden reservoirs of the virus remain in the body.

And within a population, there are always people who are more susceptible to infections, like people with depressed immune systems. For them, treatments and vaccines may not work, so they depend on the people around them to be immunized and to take proper infection control procedures.

All of which brings us back to prevention as the most effective way to combat viruses within a population. That means global coordinated action can be one of the best strategies to control the smallest pathogens. And simple tools like soap and water can be more effective at fighting a pandemic than the best drugs.

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Is there a cure for coronavirus? Why Covid-19 is so hard to treat - Vox.com

A computer image created by Nexu Science Communication together with Trinity College in Dublin, shows a model structurally representative of a betacoronavirus which is the type of virus linked to COVID-19.

Source: NEXU Science Communication | Reuters

Research has gone digital, and medical science is no exception. As the novel coronavirus continues to spread, for instance, scientists searching for a treatment have drafted IBM's Summit supercomputer, the world's most powerful high-performance computing facility, according to the Top500 list, to help find promising candidate drugs.

One way of treating an infection could be with a compound that sticks to a certain part of the virus, disarming it. With tens of thousands of processors spanning an area as large as two tennis courts, the Summit facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has more computational power than 1 million top-of-the-line laptops. Using that muscle, researchers digitally simulated how 8,000 different molecules would interact with the virus a Herculean task for your typical personal computer.

"It took us a day or two, whereas it has traditionally taken months on a normal computer," said Jeremy Smith, director of the University of Tennessee/ORNL Center for Molecular Biophysics and principal researcher in the study.

Simulations alone can't prove a treatment will work, but the project was able to identify 77 candidate molecules that other researchers can now test in trials. The fight against the novel coronavirus is just one example of how supercomputers have become an essential part of the process of discovery. The $200 million Summit and similar machines also simulate the birth of the universe, explosions from atomic weapons and a host of events too complicated or too violent to recreate in a lab.

The current generation's formidable power is just a taste of what's to come. Aurora, a $500 million Intel machine currently under installation at Argonne National Laboratory, will herald the long-awaited arrival of "exaflop" facilities capable of a billion billion calculations per second (five times more than Summit) in 2021 with others to follow. China, Japan and the European Union are all expected to switch on similar "exascale" systems in the next five years.

These new machines will enable new discoveries, but only for the select few researchers with the programming know-how required to efficiently marshal their considerable resources. What's more, technological hurdles lead some experts to believe that exascale computing might be the end of the line. For these reasons, scientists are increasingly attempting to harness artificial intelligenceto accomplish more research with less computational power.

"We as an industry have become too captive to building systems that execute the benchmark well without necessarily paying attention to how systems are used," says Dave Turek, vice president of technical computing for IBM Cognitive Systems. He likens high-performance computing record-seeking to focusing on building the world's fastest race car instead of highway-ready minivans. "The ability to inform the classic ways of doing HPC with AI becomes really the innovation wave that's coursing through HPC today."

Just getting to the verge of exascale computing has taken a decade of research and collaboration between the Department of Energy and private vendors. "It's been a journey," says Patricia Damkroger, general manager of Intel's high-performance computing division. "Ten years ago, they said it couldn't be done."

While each system has its own unique architecture, Summit, Aurora, and the upcoming Frontier supercomputer all represent variations on a theme: they harness the immense power of graphical processing units (GPUs) alongside traditional central processing units (CPUs). GPUs can carry out more simultaneous operations than a CPU can, so leaning on these workhorses has let Intel and IBM design machines that would have otherwise required untold megawatts of energy.

IBM's Summit supercomputer currently holds the record for the world's fastest supercomputer.

Source: IBM

That computational power lets Summit, which is known as a "pre-exascale" computer because it runs at 0.2 exaflops, simulate one single supernova explosion in about two months, according to Bronson Messer, the acting director of science for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. He hopes that machines like Aurora (1 exaflop) and the upcoming Frontier supercomputer (1.5 exaflops) will get that time down to about a week. Damkroger looks forward to medical applications. Where current supercomputers can digitally model a single heart, for instance, exascale machines will be able to simulate how the heart works together with blood vessels, she predicts.

But even as exascale developers take a victory lap, they know that two challenges mean the add-more-GPUs formula is likely approaching a plateau in its scientific usefulness. First, GPUs are strong but dumbbest suited to simple operations such as arithmetic and geometric calculations that they can crowdsource among their many components. Researchers have written simulations to run on flexible CPUs for decades and shifting to GPUs often requires starting from scratch.

GPU's have thousands of cores for simultaneous computation, but each handles simple instructions.

Source: IBM

"The real issue that we're wrestling with at this point is how do we move our code over" from running on CPUs to running on GPUs, says Richard Loft, a computational scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, home of Top500's 44th ranking supercomputerCheyenne, a CPU-based machine "It's labor intensive, and they're difficult to program."

Second, the more processors a machine has, the harder it is to coordinate the sharing of calculations. For the climate modeling that Loft does, machines with more processors better answer questions like "what is the chance of a once-in-a-millennium deluge," because they can run more identical simulations simultaneously and build up more robust statistics. But they don't ultimately enable the climate models themselves to get much more sophisticated.

For that, the actual processors have to get faster, a feat that bumps up against what's physically possible. Faster processors need smaller transistors, and current transistors measure about 7 nanometers. Companies might be able to shrink that size, Turek says, but only to a point. "You can't get to zero [nanometers]," he says. "You have to invoke other kinds of approaches."

If supercomputers can't get much more powerful, researchers will have to get smarter about how they use the facilities. Traditional computing is often an exercise in brute forcing a problem, and machine learning techniques may allow researchers to approach complex calculations with more finesse.

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Take drug design. A pharmacist considering a dozen ingredients faces countless possible recipes, varying amounts of each compound, which could take a supercomputer years to simulate. An emerging machine learning technique known as Bayesian Optimization asks, does the computer really need to check every single option? Rather than systematically sweeping the field, the method helps isolate the most promising drugs by implementing common-sense assumptions. Once it finds one reasonably effective solution, for instance, it might prioritize seeking small improvements with minor tweaks.

In trial-and-error fields like materials science and cosmetics, Turek says that this strategy can reduce the number of simulations needed by 70% to 90%. Recently, for instance, the technique has led to breakthroughs in battery design and the discovery of a new antibiotic.

Fields like climate science and particle physics use brute-force computation in a different way, by starting with simple mathematical laws of nature and calculating the behavior of complex systems. Climate models, for instance, try to predict how air currents conspire with forests, cities, and oceans to determine global temperature.

Mike Pritchard, a climatologist at the University of California, Irvine, hopes to figure out how clouds fit into this picture, but most current climate models are blind to features smaller than a few dozen miles wide. Crunching the numbers for a worldwide layer of clouds, which might be just a couple hundred feet tall, simply requires more mathematical brawn than any supercomputer can deliver.

Unless the computer understands how clouds interact better than we do, that is. Pritchard is one of many climatologists experimenting with training neural networksa machine learning technique that looks for patterns by trial and errorto mimic cloud behavior. This approach takes a lot of computing power up front to generate realistic clouds for the neural network to imitate. But once the network has learned how to produce plausible cloudlike behavior, it can replace the computationally intensive laws of nature in the global model, at least in theory. "It's a very exciting time," Pritchard says. "It could be totally revolutionary, if it's credible."

Companies are preparing their machines so researchers like Pritchard can take full advantage of the computational tools they're developing. Turek says IBM is focusing on designing AI-ready machines capable of extreme multitasking and quickly shuttling around huge quantities of information, and the Department of Energy contract for Aurora is Intel's first that specifies a benchmark for certain AI applications, according to Damkroger. Intel is also developing an open-source software toolkit called oneAPI that will make it easier for developers to create programs that run efficiently on a variety of processors, including CPUs and GPUs.As exascale and machine learning tools become increasingly available, scientists hope they'll be able to move past the computer engineering and focus on making new discoveries. "When we get to exascale that's only going to be half the story," Messer says. "What we actually accomplish at the exascale will be what matters."

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Next-gen supercomputers are fast-tracking treatments for the coronavirus in a race against time - CNBC

Undergraduate students in the biological sciences honors program were informed on Wednesday afternoon that they will officially not be allowed to work in laboratories starting March 28, the deadline the University set after which all classes must be held online.

As a part of the honors program, students conduct novel, independent research and then write a formal honors thesis in a specific field of study. As a result of the disruption, participants should plan to collect as much data as possible before spring break, according to an email sent by Laura Schoenle, coordinator of undergraduate research and honors.

Even though aspects of the course will be cut short, students enrolled in Biology 4990: Independent Research in Biology, will receive full credit.

If you are enrolled in BIOG 4990, you will be able to receive full credit for the course, as we will have passed the 60% time point in the semester when we reach spring break, Schoenle wrote in an email to biological sciences honors students.

The decision was made in line with the Department of Educations guidelines for assigning credit in case of a disruption in instruction.

Although students living in off-campus housing may be inclined to continue working on their research projects, Cornell has discouraged working in research labs after March 27.

I was informed yesterday that Cornell does not want undergrads to continue working in research labs after March 27 even if you are living in off-campus housing and you plan to stay here in Ithaca, said Scott D. Emr, director of the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, in an email to Weill Institute undergraduate students.

After March 27, honors students are encouraged to work with their laboratory research mentors to continue any data analysis and finish their theses remotely. The timeline for the program will remain the same, with students expected to submit their final papers to their group leader and committee for review by mid-April.

However, honors poster sessions to be held in May have been cancelled and the presentation requirement for honors will also be waived, according to Scheonle.

I realize these are challenging and stressful times. Please know that the entire university community, including the Bio Sci Honors Committee, has your best interests at heart, and respects the great efforts honors students put towards their research, Scheonle wrote.

The change in honors thesis policies sparked a variety of responses from students.

Natalie Brown 20, a Biology and Society major, works in Prof. Minglin Mas lab, biological and environmental engineering, pursuing an honors thesis project that investigates therapeutic approaches for diabetes.

I definitely understand that the decisions to cancel classes and close campus were made with consideration, but research isnt something you can just immediately pull out of, Brown said, who, like many students, acknowledged the necessity of the move while struggling to grapple with the effects of it.

Pooja Reddy 20 is a molecular and cell biology major that conducts research in Prof. Ankur Singhs lab, mechanical and aerospace engineering. For her honors thesis project, Reddy is studying how underlying health conditions, like metabolic syndrome, affect the effectiveness of vaccines.

In response to class cancellations, Reddy expressed concerns over finishing her experiments in time.

I planned on completing my experiments over the next 4 weeks to have them ready for my final thesis draft, but now I need to scramble to fit them all in two weeks, Reddy said. Having to do this while also saying goodbye to all my friends is super overwhelming and upsetting.

Claire Malkin 20, a computational biology major, works in Prof. Toshi Kawates lab, molecular medicine, studying the structure of a protein membrane receptor linked to chronic pain.

I was lucky to have just finished a lot of my data analysis so Im hoping that I can do work remotely, she said. [But] it is upsetting that we dont get to present our work, and its definitely harder to get feedback and continue work in the lab.

Even though Brown expressed frustration that many of us were planning to finish getting all of the data wed like to have during or after Spring Break, she appreciated steps being taken to accommodate undergraduates in the face of unforeseen circumstances.

I respect that measures are being taken to address the severity of this pandemic, and Im happy that we are still able to submit our theses for consideration at all, Brown said.

Whether these announced changes pertaining to biological sciences honors students will affect all undergraduate students doing research remains unclear.

For now, there is no specific guidance for students living off-campus, wrote Bill Loftus, director of administration for the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, in an email sent to students and employees at the Weill Institute on Wednesday night. Presently, we do not know if undergrads can continue working in Institute labs after April 6. We are waiting for further clarification from the University.

Prof. Julia Thom-Levy, vice provost for academic innovation, did not respond for comment by the time of publication.

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In-Person Class Cancellations Halt Undergraduate Research on Campus - Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun

Interested participants have until 27 April 2020 to submit abstracts for the IAEA International Conference on Molecular Imaging and Clinical PETCT (IPET-2020), to be held in Vienna, Austria, from 23 November to 27 November 2020.

The conference will focus on theranostics, a patient-centred and personalized form of care, coupling diagnostics and therapy, which enables medical professionals to focus on the specific needs of individual patients.

The meeting, in which participation is free, will include presentations as well as interactive sessions and free discussions with top experts in the field. Participants will be able to earn continuing medical education (CME) credits, and virtual attendees can officially register to the livestream and take brief quizzes using the conference app after individual sessions to earn some CME credits too. Up to 100 conference abstracts will be published on the conference webpage on iaea.org.

IPET-2020 will focus on theranostics which is a major topic in global health that allows us to provide personalized care tailored to the specific needs of the patient, said Diana Paez, Head of the Nuclear Medicine and Diagnostic Imaging Section at the IAEA. Participants will have the opportunity to attend in person, as well as virtually, to learn about advances in the field, the challenges faced by countries to address theranostic applications and future developments and trends.

IPET-2020 is the fourth conference of its kind; it follows three earlier conferences organized by the IAEA in 2007, 2011 and 2015. It will bring together about 500 nuclear medicine physicians, radiologists, oncologists and medical physicists from around the world. It will be a unique chance for nuclear medicine physicians and scientists working in all aspects of molecular imaging to showcase their research and create lasting connections with their colleagues from all over the globe, Paez said.

IPET-2020 provides a unique platform for professionals in medical imaging to come together and exchange experiences from their clinical work and learn how things are being done in different countries since theranostics is a field that is rapidly evolving and increasingly relevant for all of us globally, said Stefano Fanti, Director of the Nuclear Medicine Division at the St. Orsola-MalpighiUniversity Hospital in Bologna and lecturer for IPET-2020.

In addition to its focus on theranostic applications, IPET-2020 will cover the latest developments in imaging devices, radiopharmaceuticals and radio-guided surgery. Special sessions on ethics and leadership will provide an opportunity for participants to learn about the tools needed to prepare themselves for leadership in their respective professions.

An exhibition, where companies and professional organizations will be demonstrating their cutting-edge technologies, will take place alongside the sessions of the conference.

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Call for Papers: International Conference on Molecular Imaging and Clinical PETCT in November - International Atomic Energy Agency

Researchers from the University of Torontos Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research are working on developingantivirals that can combat thenovel coronavirus outbreak.

Led bySachdev Sidhu, a professor of molecular genetics, the team will apply their protein engineering technology to identify promising therapeutics.

We have diverse expertise on our team from across U of T and the University of Manitoba, which is renowned for its virology research, and we have already demonstrated that we can engineer proteins that inhibit MERS, a related coronavirus, says Sidhu, who, in addition to the Donnelly Centre holds cross appointments in the Faculty of Medicine and at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering. We will now expand on this work to design therapeutics for COVID-19.

The team recently received almost $900,000 over two years from the federal government through a rapid funding competition announced on Feb. 10 to address the COVID-19 outbreak.

Sidhu is collaborating withRoman Melnyk, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children and assistant professor of biochemistry at U of T, andBrian Mark, a structural virologist and professor at the University of Manitoba. In a 2016 proof-of-principle study withMarjolein Kikkert, a virologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, they applied a protein engineering pipeline developed by Sidhus team to create proteins that inhibit a related coronavirus that caused the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in 2012.

Wei Zhang, then a post-doctoral researcher in Sidhus lab and now an assistant professor at the University of Guelph,received a national innovation award for this research.

The researchers now plan to use the same strategy to battle the coronavirus behind the COVID-19global health crisis, which the World Health Organization today declared a pandemic.

Since the outbreak began in China in late 2019, the virus has spread to every continentexcept Antarctica, with more than 120,000 confirmed cases and more than 4,000 deaths, according to the latest figures. And while researchers around the world are racing to develop a vaccine, that is only a part of the solution, Sidhu says.

Even if a vaccine becomes available, not everyone is going to get vaccinated, says Sidhu. We see that with the flu the vaccination rates are far from 100 per cent. Should the virus become endemic and end up circulating in the population like the flu, medicines that stop the virus from replicating in an already infected person will be as important as vaccines, which prevent infection, according to Sidhu.

Jacky Chung, a research associate in the Sidhu lab, will spearhead the project by first engineering proteins that can inhibit the virus. The team will then search for small molecules that behave in the same way since they are easier to develop into therapeutics than proteins.

It's important to get the therapeutic inside the cells, which is where the virus replicates, says Chung. And small molecules can get into cells much more readily than proteins, which are much larger.

At the heart of the approach lies a protein called ubiquitin, named for being present in all plant and animal cells. Ubiquitin is an essential part of the cellular machinery that the virus hijacks for its own benefit. Upon infection, the virus releases proteins that interfere with human ubiquitin and allow it to bypass the hosts defence system and spread in the body.

To block the virus, the researchers will create synthetic ubiquitin variants (UbV) that thwart rather than aid its ability to replicate. By analyzing the molecular structures of different UbVs bound to the viral protein, they will gain clues into the kinds of small molecules that are most likely to be effective against the virus.

Sidhu says that, within two years, they should have candidate molecules that could be developed into therapeutics. We know there are literally armies of medicinal chemists and various companies that could then optimize the molecule into a drug that can be given to humans, says Sidhu who was previously at pharmaceutical giant Genentech and has founded six startups since joining the university.

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U of T researchers hunt for antivirals to treat COVID-19 patients - News@UofT

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Flagship Pioneering, a life sciences innovation enterprise, announced the launch of Repertoire Immune Medicines, a clinical-stage biotechnology company tapping the curative powers of our immune system to prevent, treat and cure cancer, autoimmune disorders and infectious diseases.

Repertoire Immune Medicines was formed by combining two Flagship companies the innovative and proprietary immune decoding platforms of Cogen Immune Medicines and the immuno-oncology platforms of Torque Therapeutics to create a fully integrated Immune Medicines company. At the helm is Chief Executive Officer John Cox, who most recently led the spin-off of Bioverativ (BIIV) from Biogen (BIIB), and its growth and successful acquisition by Sanofi (SNY).

During the last 4 years, these two Flagship Pioneering originated companies each advanced novel and complementary platforms protected by over 30 patent families. Through their combination, Repertoire Immune Medicines now has the unique capability to decipher human subject-derived antigen-T cell receptor (TCR) codes from healthy or diseased tissues in the context of the major MHC (HLA) types. These complexes dictate T cell activation or exhaustion, and their immunological codes can be used to design and clinically test a multitude of unprecedented therapeutic products based on precedented and specific mechanisms of T cell killing of antigen presenting tumor cells or infected cells.

Repertoire is pioneering a new class of therapies based on high throughput, high content interrogation of the intrinsic ability of T cells to prevent, or cure diseases, said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of Repertoire Immune Medicine. He continued, our products will be designed to leverage the highly evolved, potent and clinically-validated mechanism of the natural immune synapse to provide immune security to patients. With these ambitious goals in mind, we are pleased to have a proven leader, John Cox, as CEO to realize our shared vision to dramatically improve outcomes for those in need or at risk.

Repertoire has developed a suite of DECODE technologies that allows in-depth characterization of the immune synapse with unprecedented precision. The company leverages its functional response technologies to thoroughly understand the presentation of antigens in disease, de-orphan T cell receptors in the context of single-cell phenotypes, and curate vast amounts of data to enable deep-learning computational prediction models. By coupling single cell technologies with cellular and acellular antigen libraries, the company decodes CD4+ and CD8+ TCR-antigen specificity across selected T cell subsets from patients and from healthy individuals.

I am pleased to work with the Flagship Pioneering team to integrate these two pioneering companies into a fully formed immune medicines business, said John Cox, Chief Executive Officer of Repertoire Immune Medicines. Advancing rationally designed immune medicines into the clinic and eventually to commercialization offers tremendous potential for patients and long-term value for our shareholders.

Three DECODE discovery technologies are at the core of the companys immune synapse deciphering platform:

Decoding immune synapses relevant to a particular disease allows Repertoire to deploy the molecular codes to rationally design new immune medicines as disease-fighting TCRs and disease-associated antigens in its therapeutic products.

Repertoires DEPLOY technologies form a product-based platform that includes:

Repertoire is currently engaged in its first dose escalation safety trial with an autologous T cell product TRQ15-01, which leverages its proprietary PRIME platform to prepare the patients T cells and its proprietary TETHER platform to link an IL-15 nanogel immune modulator to the T cells.

The journey for Repertoire Immune Medicines commenced when Flagship Labs scientists contemplated how to rationally and efficiently direct the power of our T cells for therapeutics and cures. One origination group, led by David Berry, M.D., Ph.D., General Partner of Flagship Pioneering, focused on systematically unlocking antigen specific immune control. In parallel, another Flagship origination group, led by Doug Cole, M.D., General Partner of Flagship Pioneering, and based on the cytokine binding work from Prof. Darrell Irvines lab at MIT, focused on using autologous T cells to direct potent immune modulators to the tumor microenvironment.

To date, the combined companies raised over $220M to create and develop the DECODE discovery platform and DEPLOY product platform, and to initiate its first clinical trial of PRIME & TETHER T cells in cancer. Repertoires rapid advancement reflects its creative, dedicated and diverse team of over 120 professionals possessing expertise in immunology, experimental medicine, physics, computational science, material sciences, process engineering, bioengineering, protein design and applied mathematics.

ABOUT REPERTOIRE IMMUNE MEDICINESRepertoire Immune Medicines, a Flagship Pioneering company, is a clinical stage biotechnology company working to unleash the remarkable power of the human immune system to prevent, treat or cure cancer, autoimmune conditions and infectious diseases. The company is founded on the premise that the repertoire of TCR-antigen codes that drive health and disease represents one of the greatest opportunities for innovation in medical science. The company harnesses and deploys the intrinsic ability of T cells to prevent and cure disease. Repertoire scientists created and developed a suite of technologies for its DECODE discovery and DEPLOY product platforms that allow in-depth characterization of the immune synapse and the ability to rationally design, and clinically develop, multi-clonal immune medicines. The company is currently conducting experimental medicine clinical trials using autologous T cells primed against cancer antigens and tethered to IL-15. To learn more about Repertoire Immune Medicine, please visit our website: http://www.repertoire.com.

ABOUT FLAGSHIP PIONEERINGFlagship Pioneering conceives, creates, resources, and develops first-in-category life sciences companies to transform human health and sustainability. Since its launch in 2000, the firm has applied a unique hypothesis-driven innovation process to originate and foster more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in over $30 billion in aggregate value. To date, Flagship is backed by more than $3.3 billion of aggregate capital commitments, of which over $1.7 billion has been deployed toward the founding and growth of its pioneering companies alongside more than $10 billion of follow-on investments from other institutions. The current Flagship ecosystem comprises 37 transformative companies, including: Axcella Health (NADAQ: AXLA), Denali Therapeutics (NASDAQ: DNLI), Evelo Biosciences (NASDAQ: EVLO), Foghorn Therapeutics, Indigo Agriculture, Kaleido Biosciences (NASDAQ: KLDO), Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA), Rubius Therapeutics (NASDAQ: RUBY), Seres Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MCRB), and Syros Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SYRS). To learn more about Flagship Pioneering, please visit our website: http://www.FlagshipPioneering.com.

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Flagship Pioneering Announces the Launch of Repertoire Immune Medicines with Industry Veteran John G. Cox as Chief Executive Officer - Business Wire