Curate Biosciences Announces David Backer as Chief Executive Officer

Former Oxford Biomedica CCO to bring extensive
cell and gene therapy commercialization expertise

CARLSBAD, Calif., Dec. 16, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Curate Biosciences, a key enabling technology company for cell therapy manufacturing, today announced that David M. Backer will become the Company's next chief executive officer (CEO) and a member of Curate's Board of Directors. Backer brings decades of cell and gene therapy experience to the company as it looks to accelerate the production of life-saving medicines and change health outcomes for patients with intractable diseases. Founding CEO Michael Grisham will assume the responsibility of Chairman of the Board at Curate.

"I'm delighted to join Curate at this pivotal moment and help capitalize on the great work this team has done to develop a first-in-class technology," said Backer. "CAR-T cell therapies have been curative for intractable diseases like cancer, and many more cell therapies are in development for patients. What drew me to Curate is a shared vision of enabling companies to produce improved therapies more cost effectively, for more patients."

Backer most recently served as Chief Commercial Officer at Oxford Biomedica, and prior to that, was Senior Vice President, Commercial Development at cell and gene therapy-enabling tech company ElevateBio. He also founded and led the successful sale of Molecular Medicine BioServices to Sigma-Aldrich's SAFC division, leading to an extensive career at Sigma-Aldrich SAFC and MilliporeSigma. He completed his tenure at MilliporeSigma as Head of Commercial Development for Gene Editing and Novel Modalities.

"David's commercial experience and alignment with our vision is the perfect fit for us as Curate goes to market. His deep knowledge of the cell and gene therapy space will help us position our game-changing technology to help advance an industry with so much potential to help the patients most in need," said Mike Grisham, Founder and Chairman of Curate Biosciences. "Years of investment, support from NIH and our commercial partners, and the hard work of our fantastic development team led to this point. We can't wait to see what the future brings."

The Curate® Cell Processing System uses the Company's proprietary Deterministic Cell Separation™ microfluidic approach to isolate healthier white cell populations at ~95% recovery, with ~98% platelet and ~95% red cell removal in under an hour. Today's cell therapies are expensive and time-consuming to produce, in part because the highly inefficient process of isolating a patient's own cells leaves too few behind to make an effective therapeutic dose. Starting smarter with Curate® processing simplifies and accelerates manufacturing, meaning lower costs, higher yields, and more manufacturing flexibility – even enabling distributed manufacturing models.

For more information, please visit www.curatebio.com.

Curate Biosciences is a life science company located in Carlsbad, CA, that has developed what standard cell processing technologies have failed to provide: the best quality starting material to dramatically reduce the total vein-to-vein cost. Curate Biosciences advances its platform technology – The Curate^® Cell Processing System – to allow a faster path to cleaner and larger quantities of starting cells, one of the significant bottlenecks in gene and cell therapies. The Curate^® Cell Processing System isolates leukocytes using Deterministic Cell Separation™ (DCS), an advanced, high-speed microfluidic technology that gently separates cells based on size. Optimized for processing apheresis and cell culture samples, the Curate platform obtains larger quantities of healthier leukocytes compared to other separation technologies.

For more information: www.curatebio.com

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SOURCE Curate Biosciences