Mendus appoints NK cell pioneer Lewis Lanier to Scientific Advisory Board
MENDUS’ STRENGTHENS SCIENTIFIC BASIS FOR NK CELL RESEARCH, AS LONGER-TERM PIPELINE PROGRAM COMPLEMENTING CLINICAL-STAGE LEAD ASSETS
Mendus AB (“Mendus” publ; IMMU.ST), a biopharmaceutical company focused on immunotherapies addressing tumor recurrence, today announced the appointment of Lewis Lanier, PhD, Professor Emeritus in Microbiology and Immunology at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), to the Mendus’ Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). Dr. Lanier is a world-leading expert on natural killer (NK) cells, and is renowned for his contributions to the characterization of how NK cells distinguish between healthy cells and infected or cancerous cells. He has published seminal work on key receptors that activate and inhibit NK cells, and has shown how they can be applied to fight cancer cells. Dr. Lanier complements the Mendus SAB, which comprises Inge Marie Svane, MD PhD, Sjoerd van der Burg, PhD, Tanja de Gruijl, PhD, and is being chaired by Ada Kruisbeek, PhD. Pawel Kalinski, MD PhD, will retire as SAB member.
“While our lead assets are advancing through clinical development and preclinical work supporting these programs is largely completed, Mendus research department continues to apply a data- and science-driven strategy to identify and prepare the basis for the next value drivers and will put a greater focus on the NK cell program,” commented Alex Karlsson-Parra, MD, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Mendus. “There could hardly be any better guidance than having Lewis Lanier on our SAB as one of the most influential pioneers in the NK cell space. Together with Ada Kruisbeek and the other SAB members, Mendus is now well-equipped for the next phase of scientific innovation in the company. We also thank Pawel Kalinski, who leaves the SAB, for his very valuable contributions to bringing our lead programs vididencel and ilixadencel into advanced-stage clinical development.”
Dr. Lewis Lanier has served as the chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, the co-leader of the Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Program at the UCSF’s Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI). He has published more than 400 scientific articles and is a Senior Editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, and has served as an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Immunology, Annual Review of Immunology, Immunological Reviews, Tissue Antigens, Human Immunology, Immunogenetics, and Immunity. In recognition of his scientific contributions, he was awarded the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic Tumor Immunology from the Cancer Research Institute in New York in 2002, was given the Rose Payne Award for contributions to the field of Immunogenetics by the American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics in 2005, was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, in 2010, and was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology by the American Society for Microbiology and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.
“Memory NK cells have been associated with strong in vivo persistence, improved tumor cell killing ability and ultimately clinical benefit. However, enriching these cells for therapeutic purposes has been an elusive target for many years. Mendus proprietary DCOne platform as a mediator for improved memory NK cell proliferation is a promising new approach to source potentially powerful NK cell-based cancer immunotherapies,“ commented Lewis Lanier, PhD, Professor Emeritus in Microbiology and Immunology at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
As part of the innate immune system, NK cells are able to kill infected or malignant cells and to secrete cytokines that induce a subsequent response by T-cells and B cells. To serve this function, NK cells express a broad range of inhibitory and activating receptors on their cell surface that interact with potential target cells. Based on its expertise in dendritic cell biology, Mendus has explored the use of its proprietary DCOne platform to improve other cell-based therapies. Data presented first at the 2022 Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Conference, describe the application of the DCOne platform to expand memory NK cells, an important subset of NK cells because of their longevity, resistance to immune suppression and correlation with improved clinical outcome in blood-borne tumors. Establishing a novel method to expand this class of NK cells may provide the basis for novel, improved NK cell-based therapies, as a potential new program in the Mendus pipeline.
ABOUT MENDUS AB (PUBL)
Mendus is dedicated to changing the course of cancer treatment by addressing tumor recurrence and improving survival outcomes for cancer patients, while preserving quality of life. We are leveraging our unparalleled expertise in allogeneic dendritic cell biology to develop an advanced clinical pipeline of novel, off-the-shelf, cell-based immunotherapies which combine clinical efficacy with a benign safety profile. Based in Sweden and The Netherlands, Mendus is publicly traded on the Nasdaq Stockholm under the ticker IMMU.ST.
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