Poseida Therapeutics Appoints Five New Members to Its Gene Therapy Scientific Advisory Board

Poseida Therapeutics, a clinical-stage cell and gene therapy company advancing a new class of treatments for patients with cancer and rare diseases, has announced the appointment of five new members to its Gene Therapy Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). These world-class researchers will join George M. Church, Ph.D., Chair of Poseida’s recently formed Gene Therapy SAB, to provide counsel on the Company’s gene therapy programs in development.

The new Gene Therapy Scientific Advisory Board members at Poseida are:

• Ian Alexander, MBBS, Ph.D., Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Medicine at the University of Sydney, Australia;
• Julian Grünewald, M.D., Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Munich, Germany;
• Mark Kay, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Pediatrics and Genetics at Stanford University;
• Mark Tracy, Ph.D., President of Tracy BioConsulting, LLC; and
• Kathryn Whitehead, Ph.D., Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University

“We are honored to welcome this world-class group of scientists to join Poseida’s Gene Therapy SAB,” said Blair Madison, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer, Gene Therapy at Poseida. “We have made great strides in our gene therapy programs over the last year and are excited to continue this work in collaboration with this team of experts.”

Brent Warner, President of Gene Therapy at Poseida, added: “We are pleased to round out our Gene Therapy SAB as we enter a pivotal moment in the preclinical development of our gene therapy programs for rare diseases with urgent unmet need. We look forward to leveraging the SAB’s breadth and depth of expertise and believe that with their guidance, we can be successful in advancing a new class of meaningful and targeted gene therapies.”

The Company is currently developing a number of gene therapies addressing rare and life-threatening diseases such as Ornithine Transcarbamylase Deficiency, Hemophilia A and Phenylketonuria, three genetic diseases usually diagnosed early in life. These therapies utilize the Company’s proprietary genetic engineering platform technologies, including its Cas-CLOVER™ Site-specific Gene Editing System and piggyBac^® DNA Delivery System, in combination with nanoparticle technology, for highly efficient integration that may result in potential single treatment cures.

“The promise of gene therapy and gene editing is emerging as one of the most exciting areas of drug development today,” said Dr. Church. “While early successes have been encouraging, the field has been faced with a number of challenges that have limited the number of patients who could benefit from such treatments. However, novel gene therapy approaches, including non-viral gene editing technologies, have the potential to reach unaddressed and underserved patient populations, with the goal of safely and permanently correcting the underlying causes of a wide range of rare diseases.”