LAWRENCEVILLE, N.J., Oct. 06, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — IMUNON, Inc. (NASDAQ: IMNN), a clinical-stage drug-development company focused on developing non-viral DNA-mediated immunotherapy and next-generation vaccines, announces the appointment of Patrick Ott, M.D., Ph.D. to the Company’s scientific advisory board.
Dr. Ott is the Clinical Director of the Melanoma Disease Center and the Director, Clinical Sciences, of the Center for Immuno-Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He joins current scientific advisory board members Dan H. Barouch, M.D., Ph.D., Luke D. Handke, Ph.D., Sachet A. Shukla, Ph.D. and John W. Shiver, Ph.D.
“We are honored that Dr. Ott has agreed to our scientific advisory board and believe that he will offer invaluable guidance as we further develop our technologies and advance our pipeline,” said Dr. Corinne Le Goff, president and chief executive officer of IMUNON. “His work with neoantigen vaccines should be particularly relevant as we advance our FixPlas™ and IndiPlas™ modalities into off the shelf and personalized cancer therapeutics. Preclinical work in melanoma is already underway.”
Dr. Ott serves as an attending physician in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich and completed his post-doctoral training in immunology and his residency in Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. After a fellowship in hematology-oncology and four years on the faculty at New York University, he joined Dana-Farber in 2012.
He is a clinical investigator and a member of the clinical trials program at Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, where he designs and conducts Phase 1 immunotherapy trials for patients with a range of tumors including melanoma. His primary research interests are in the development of innovative tumor vaccine approaches. Dr. Ott has been Principal Investigator of a first-in-human clinical trial testing a personalized vaccine (NeoVax) in patients with melanoma. He has served as Principal Investigator and co-investigator on more than 30 treatment trials, including for pembrolizumab and nivolumab in advanced melanoma, small cell lung cancer and other cancers. This work has resulted in numerous high-impact publications, including Nature, Nature Medicine, Cell, Cancer Cell and the Journal of Clinical Oncology. He has authored more than 160 peer-reviewed articles.
About IMUNON
IMUNON is a fully integrated, clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on advancing a portfolio of innovative treatments that harness the body’s natural mechanisms to generate safe, effective and durable responses across a broad array of human diseases, constituting a differentiating approach from conventional therapies. IMUNON is developing its non-viral DNA technology across four modalities. The first modality, TheraPlas®, is developed for the coding of proteins and cytokines in the treatment of solid tumors where an immunological approach is deemed promising. The second modality, PlaCCine®, is developed for the coding of viral antigens that can elicit a strong immunological response. This technology may represent a promising platform for the development of vaccines in infectious diseases. The third modality, FixPlas®, concerns the application of our DNA technology to produce universal cancer vaccines, also called tumor associated antigen cancer vaccines. The fourth modality, IndiPlas®, is in the discovery phase and will focus on the development of personalized cancer vaccines, or neoepitope cancer vaccines.
The Company’s lead clinical program, IMNN-001, is a DNA-based immunotherapy for the localized treatment of advanced ovarian cancer currently in Phase 2 development. IMNN-001 works by instructing the body to produce safe and durable levels of powerful cancer-fighting molecules, such as interleukin-12 and interferon gamma, at the tumor site. Additionally, the Company is conducting IND-enabling preclinical studies for the development of a COVID-19 booster vaccine (IMNN-101) and a treatment for the LASSA virus (IMNN-102). The Company has also initiated preclinical work to develop a Trp2 tumor associated antigen cancer vaccine in melanoma (IMNN-201). We will continue to leverage these modalities and to advance the technological frontier of plasmid DNA to better serve patients with difficult-to-treat conditions. For more information on IMUNON, visit www.imunon.com.
