Will lead Elicio’s oversee clinical operations and assist in defining development strategy, guiding protocol design, study conduct, and regulatory compliance
CAMBRIDGE MA., April 15, 2020– Elicio Therapeutics, a next generation immuno-oncology company, announced today that Esther Welkowsky has joined Elicio as Vice President, Clinical Operations.
“Esther is an accomplished clinical operations leader with over 15 years of biotechnology development experience across T cell immunotherapy, biologics, and small molecules,” commented Elicio Executive Vice President, Head of R&D and Chief Medical Officer Christopher Haqq MD PhD. “Esther and I have worked well together in past global development programs, and she will play a vital role in successful execution of the clinical trials planned for our Amphiphile product candidates, building Elicio’s development team and successful collaborations with contract research organizations. We are fortunate to attract biotech leaders like Esther with deep experience and capabilities to join our team.”
Esther has managed clinical operations teams for numerous oncology clinical trials working closely with global regulatory agencies, most recently as Executive Director of Clinical Operations at Allogene. Throughout her career, Esther has contributed to many successful NDA filings including Zytiga®, Yondelis®, Avastin®, Raptiva®and Lucentis®. She completed her Bachelor of Science in Microbiology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“I am excited to join Elicio’s strong R&D team as its Amphiphile technology is poised to enter phase 1 testing,” said Ms. Welkowsky. “I am looking forward to overseeing clinical translation of Elicio’s immunotherapies including its novel KRAS vaccine, ELI-002, inpancreatic, colorectal and other solid tumors and advancing the pipeline.”
About the Amphiphile Platform
The Elicio Amphiphile platform enables precise targeting and delivery of immunogens and cell-therapy activators directly to the lymphatic system, the “brain center” of the immune response, to significantly amplify and enhance the body’s own system of defenses, defeat solid and hematologic cancers, and prevent their recurrence. Once in the lymph nodes, Amphiphile immunotherapies are taken up by antigen presenting cells (APC’s) to orchestrate signaling to natural or engineered immune cells in order to maximize therapeutic immune responses to disease. This strategy has been used to improve the activity of immunostimulatory agents, antigens, adjuvants, and cell-therapies that generate little to no response when used in the conventional forms. By precisely targeting these immunotherapies to the lymph nodes, Amphiphiles can unlock their full potential to generate and amplify anti-tumor immune responses. This substantially enhanced anti-tumor functionality and long-term protective memory may someday unlock the full potential of the immune response to eliminate cancer.
About Elicio Therapeutics
Elicio Therapeutics, based in Cambridge, MA, is committed to transforming the lives of patients and their families by re-engineering the body’s immune response to defeat cancer. By combining expertise in materials science and immunology, Elicio is engineering potent Amphiphile immunotherapies, including lymph node targeted cell therapy activators, immunomodulators, adjuvants and vaccines for an array of aggressive cancers. Elicio’s lead Amphiphile vaccine targeting KRAS-driven cancers will begin initial patient studies in pancreatic cancer patients in 2020. These programs are followed by a broad preclinical pipeline of lymph node targeted immunotherapies. For more information, please visit https://elicio.com.
Contacts
Elicio Therapeutics: Merina Zeller, 617-482-0042, mzeller@denterlein.com