Innovative Cellular Therapeutics Strengthens Executive Leadership Team with Appointment of Morten Marott as Chief Financial Officer

ROCKVILLE, Md., Dec. 05, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Innovative Cellular Therapeutics (ICT), a biotechnology company developing a comprehensive platform of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies for liquid and solid tumors, today announced the appointment of Morten Marott, who joined ICT as Chief Financial Officer in July 2019. Mr. Marott was formerly Chief Financial Officer of publicly traded Veloxis Pharmaceuticals A/S and has extensive M&A and capital markets experience from Wall Street.

“Morten has already been invaluable to our company in terms of setting us up for success, as we expand our U.S. activities,” said Larry (Lei) Xiao, Ph.D., ICT’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “We look forward to Morten’s continued guidance and strategic planning expertise as we seek to expand our clinical stage pipeline of next generation CAR-T cell therapies to transform cancer treatments worldwide. We are already off to a strong start in the United States with the recent clearance by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of our Investigational New Drug (IND) application for ICTCAR014 in patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), including patients whose tumors are PD-L1 positive.”

Before joining ICT, Mr. Marott was Chief Financial Officer of Veloxis Pharmaceuticals A/S, a publicly traded biopharmaceutical company located in Cary, North Carolina, where he drove the corporate strategy, business development and global investor relations efforts. Previously, Mr. Marott was a senior investment banker in the Healthcare Investment Banking Group at Deutsche Bank in New York. Prior to this, he was with the Healthcare Investment Banking Groups of RBC Capital Markets and Citigroup. He has more than a decade of Wall Street experience in M&A, healthcare investment banking and equity research with a primary focus on the U.S. biopharmaceutical industry.

Mr. Marott holds an MBA in finance and accounting from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a Business Administration degree from Copenhagen Business School, and Bachelor and Master of Law degrees (JD) from the University of Copenhagen.

“ICT’s innovative CAR-T technology platform, strong in-house R&D team and manufacturing capability are the core of the Company’s rapid global development strategy,” Mr. Marott said. “These are key differentiating factors in the CAR-T space. I look forward to ensuring that ICT reaches meaningful value inflection points and validates its clinical programs.”

About ICTCAR014
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared ICT’s Investigational New Drug (IND) application for ICTCAR014, a next generation CD19-targeting CAR-T cell therapy that expresses a dominant negative PD-1 protein to block immunosuppression by cancer cells. ICT is moving ICTCAR014 into a U.S. clinical trial. ICTCAR014, referred to as an “armored” CAR-T cell therapy, has already shown encouraging results in proof-of-concept human trials in China. As highlighted in ICT’s presentation at the November 2019 Society for the Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) meeting, ICTCAR014 demonstrated a 92.3% objective response rate (53.8% complete remission; 38.5% partial remission) in 13 initial patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Significant tumor shrinkage and limited toxicity were observed.

About Innovative Cellular Therapeutics
Innovative Cellular Therapeutics (ICT) is a clinical stage biotechnology company focused on the development of cellular immunotherapies for the treatment of liquid and solid tumors. ICT has achieved promising preclinical and clinical results in late-stage leukemia and lymphoma with its next generation CAR-T constructs. ICT’s lead candidate in the U.S., ICTCAR014, is a next generation CD19-targeting CAR-T cell therapy that expresses a dominant negative PD-1 (dnPD-1) protein to block immunosuppression by cancer cells. ICTCAR014 is being developed for patients with relapsed or refractory non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), including PD-L1 positive patients. ICT’s lead candidate in China, ICTCAR003, is a CD19-targeting CAR-T cell therapy for the treatment of B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The Company also has a broad pipeline of CAR-T candidates targeting solid tumors. For more information, please visit www.ictbio.com.