Daclizumab

Barry Selick, Ph.D., successful biopharmaceuticalscientist, senior executive and entrepreneur, appointed Chief Executive Officer Carin Rollins, Hinge Bio co-founder, becomes Chief Operating Officer Joshua Carle, experienced business development and R&D investment executive, appointed Chief Business Officer BURLINGAME, Calif., Jan. 18, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hinge Bio, Inc., a privately-held biotechnology company, today announced the expansion of its senior management team, which is expected to drive the Company’s GEM-DIMER™ programs, with an initial focus in oncology, to clinical development. Harold E. “Barry” Selick, Ph.D., a successful and distinguished biopharmaceutical scientist, senior executive and venture investor, was named as Chief Executive Officer. Carin Rollins, a Company co-founder, becomes Chief Operating Officer. Joshua Carle, an experienced business development executive from both the buy-side and sell-side, joins the Company as Chief Business Officer. “We have been making considerable progress demonstrating the advantages and breadth of our novel GEM-DIMER technology and solidifying a strong intellectual property position,” said Ms. Rollins, Chief Operating Officer of Hinge Bio. “Now is the time to add executives who can accelerate the clinical and business development activities of our powerful GEM-DIMER platform. We are thrilled to have Barry and Josh join Hinge Bio to facilitate these initiatives.” Dr. Selick has had a successful and distinguished career in the biopharmaceutical industry, managing growth and development of emerging biopharmaceutical companies as a scientist and executive and helping to fund and start early-stage companies. As a biopharmaceutical executive, he was the CEO of Threshold Pharmaceuticals, a fully integrated oncology drug discovery/clinical development company that he led as CEO from its Series A financing through IPO to its eventual sale in 2017. Dr. Selick co-founded and was CEO and Chairman of Camitro, a California and UK-based drug discovery predictive modeling technology company, which was acquired two years after its founding. Dr. Selick was Vice President of Research, responsible for technology development and drug discovery, at Affymax Research Institute through its acquisition by Glaxo Wellcome, plc. Prior to Affymax, he was at Anergen and Protein Design Labs (PDL), the latter at which he co-invented the technology underlying fully humanized antibody therapeutics and applied that to daclizumab (Zenapax®), the first FDA-approved fully humanized antibody therapeutic. Most recently, Dr. Selick was the Vice Chancellor of Business Development, Innovation and Partnerships at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) as the head of Innovation Ventures, which supports the translation of UCSF innovation from the laboratory to patient and societal benefit. He was also a Venture Partner at Sofinnova Ventures from June 2002 until July 2007. Dr. Selick has been a member of the Boards of Directors of a dozen both early-stage venture capital-backed as well as public biotech companies and Chairman and/or Lead Director of many of those. Dr. Selick earned a B.A. in Biophysics and a Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania and was a Damon Runyan-Walter Winchell Cancer Fund Fellow as well as a Senior Fellow of the American Cancer Society at UCSF. “The opportunity to create novel technologies that can be translated into therapeutics that improve patients’ lives has motivated my entire career,” said Dr. Selick. “The unique GEM-DIMER platform’s wide range of addressable therapeutic indications and its ability to engage multiple target molecules in a novel manner enables broad opportunities in drug development for improved therapies against validated targets as well as first in class options for novel ones. The team has made remarkable progress so far in demonstrating the technical potential of the platform and I am excited to join them as we advance Hinge Bio’s programs toward product candidate selection and clinical development with an initial focus on therapeutics that will benefit patients living with cancer.” Mr. Carle is a cross-functional executive with more than 20 years of strategic transaction and R&D investment experience while in management consulting and biopharma. Mr. Carle has led or advised on more than fifty potential strategic transactions, resulting in the successful execution of greater than $2 billion in disclosed deal value and committed R&D funds. Prior to joining Hinge Bio, Mr. Carle was Vice President, Business Development at Triumvira Immunologics, Inc., an immune-oncology company, where he executed a clinical collaboration for a leading checkpoint inhibitor, in-licensed a novel antibody, and executed multiple agreements with leading global and cell therapy companies. Before joining Triumvira, he was at Pfizer Inc., where he drove BD strategy, commercial assessments, and broad transaction support for licensing/M&A efforts for Pfizer Oncology. Previously, Mr. Carle held roles of increasing responsibility in business development activities at Daiichi Sankyo Inc. and Clearview Projects Inc., a strategic advisory firm focused on licensing/M&A for the BioPharma industry. Mr. Carle earned a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and M.B.A. from the Villanova School of Business. “The versatility of the GEM-DIMER platform, due to its multi-target engagement flexibility, ease of manufacture, and applicability to multiple therapeutic areas provides a wide variety of opportunities to execute strategic partnerships with top-tier biopharmaceutical companies,” said Mr. Carle. “I look forward to working with my colleagues and future industry partners to translate this platform into important medicines.” About Hinge Bio Hinge Bio is a privately held biotechnology company leveraging its powerful GEM-DIMER™ platform to develop therapeutics that address the problems of inadequate efficacy and resistance in diseases including cancer, inflammatory disease, and infectious disease. The GEM-DIMER platform creates multivalent, multispecific antibody-based therapeutics that bind their targets in a novel manner allowing for dramatically enhanced biological activity and unique functionality. The GEM-DIMER technology was invented by Hinge Bio’s Chief Scientific Officer, Daniel Capon, Ph.D., who previously was the first to clone and express recombinant Factor VIII (Genentech) and invented Fc-fusion proteins (Genentech) as well as chimeric antigen receptors for T cell therapy/CAR-T (Cell Genesys). Dr. Capon also holds patents on the XenoMouse for the production of fully human antibodies (Abgenix) and the PhenoSense drug susceptibility and resistance test (Monogram Biosciences/LabCorp). Learn more at . Contacts: Hinge Bio: Carin Rollins Chief Operating Officer carin.rollins@hingebio.com or info@hingebio.com Media: Selina Husain / Robert Flamm, Ph.D. Burns McClellan, Inc. shusain@burnsmc.com / rflamm@burnsmc.com

An RNA-focused therapeutics company, Seattle-based Shape Therapeutics has developed a technology that is allowing it to evolve programmable RNA medicines that push the limits of current gene editing capabilities in a safer and more effective manner. Chief Scientific Officer David Huss outlined the company’s capabilities in an interview with BioSpace. He said that at its core, Shape has built a number of different platform technologies that span payloads, deliveries and manufacturing. Harnessing the capabilities of machine learning and artificial intelligence programs, Huss said the company strongly relies on information that comes from a patient’s specific mutation and broader, within a disease class. The company’s capabilities allow it to analyze hundreds of billions of therapeutic possibilities and advance breakthroughs in RNA editing, next-generation AAVs and disruptive gene therapy manufacturing. “We have data in-house that will allow us to predict the sequence of an RNA therapeutic that will allow for an RNA edit for a specific target,” Huss said. “We are inventing new approaches for machine learning and high-throughput screening on a massive scale to engineer completely novel RNAs that correct mutations, fine-tune gene expression and modulate protein interactions.” Shape Therapeutics has in-house data that will allow it to predict the sequence of an RNA therapeutic that will allow an RNA edit for a specific target. The company has three different technology platforms it uses to advance its RNA-based therapies: RNAfix, RNAskip and AAVid. Huss explained that an RNA approach to gene editing is potentially more effective than conventional approaches such as CRISPR and also significantly safer. There have been serious concerns regarding off-target DNA damage and therapeutic-related malignancies from CRISPR-Cas9 technology as well as ethical concerns related to the highly-controversial CRISPR baby incident in China. He noted that CRISPR is, essentially, a “large bacterial chain,” sequences that are derived from DNA fragments of bacteriophages that had previously infected the prokaryote. Inserting that into a person to make a permanent change to their DNA “sends up a red flag” Huss said. “When you’re targeting the DNA level, there’s a permanent, inheritable change. It’s an all-or-nothing approach. At the RNA level, we can tailor the effect. It allows us to tune the approach," he explained. There are other RNA editing-focused companies, such as Adarx Pharmaceuticals, WAVE life Sciences, which recently posted positive Phase I/II data for its amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) therapy, and Korro Bio, which raised $116 million in a Series B financing round earlier this year. For its approach, Shape Therapeutics uses a fully human protein called ADAR (adenosine deaminase acting on RNA) that is present in every cell of the body and has a natural editing function, Huss said. The ADAR proteins he referred to bind to double-stranded RNA, changing the nucleotide content of RNA, which has a disruptive effect. Huss said there’s a beauty in RNA editing and harnessing the ADAR mechanism. He said the RNA-based therapeutic recruits the ADAR that’s already found within a cell “and puts it in a place it may not normally go.” It’s believed that this approach will be far safer for patients. So far, the company is seeing proof of this in its research into Parkinson’s disease and the ocular disorder, Stargardt disease. Shape’s approach is certainly drawing attention from the industry. Last year, Swiss pharma giant Roche ponied up a partnership with Shape valued at more than $3 billion. Under the terms of the deal, Roche will apply two of the company’s technologies, RNAfix and AAVid, to develop next-generation tissue-specific adeno-associated viruses for new gene therapies aimed at neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s. Shape is conducting the preclinical work and will then pass along potential candidates for Roche to take into the clinic. The kind of partnership Shape has with Roche is something the company hopes to expand to other large pharma organizations, Huss noted. He explained that Shape cannot go after all disease types on its own, so the company wants to forge partnerships that will let others take the lead. “The promise and hope (of gene therapy) drive so many of us,” he said. While there is significant promise in gene therapy, Huss pointed out that many of the clinical holds that have been issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, such as that placed on Mustang Bio earlier this year, are related to manufacturing issues. Shape has recognized this issue and taken steps to build its own infrastructure and innovate for its own needs, he said. Before joining Shape, Huss led a T cell engineering team at Juno Therapeutics, which is now part of Bristol Myers Squibb. Before that, he focused on translational and clinical development programs at Biogen for multiple sclerosis drugs Tecfidera and Zinbryta, the latter of which has been withdrawn from the U.S. Market due to safety concerns. While at Juno, he worked with Francois Vigneault, the co-founder of Shape Therapeutics. At Juno, Vigneault was the vice president of research. Following the acquisition of Juno, Vigneault had the vision to build Shape around RNA-editing technology. “He saw the power of what RNA editing with a protein that’s present in your body can do, that it can really move past the major limitations of the CRISPR technology,” Huss said. Seeing the potential of the technology, Huss joined the company, first as head of research before being promoted to CSO last year. As Shape moves forward with its programs, Huss pointed to significant progress the company has made with its AAVid platform to generate different variants targeting the central nervous system, as well as other muscle and tissue types. “We’re really excited about how this is progressing,” he said. “We’re a data-first company and our data is validating what we’re doing.”