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Indee Labs Announces Formation of Strategic Advisory Board

May 22, 2019 Off By BusinessWire

Indee Labs Strategic Advisory Board Includes Six Globally-Recognised
Experts in the Discovery, Development and Commercialisation of
Microfluidic Devices and Cell Therapies like Chimeric Antigen Receptor
T-cells (CAR-T)

BERKELEY, Calif. & SYDNEY–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Indee. Inc. (“Indee Labs America”) and Indee. Pty. Ltd. (“Indee
Labs Australia”) known collectively as “Indee
Labs” announced, today, the formation of a Strategic Advisory
Board (“SAB”). The SAB includes six globally-recognised experts
in the discovery, development and commercialisation of deep technology
startups involving both microfluidic devices and cell therapies such
chimeric antigen receptor T-cells (“CAR-T”).

The formation of the SAB will strengthen the existing scientific
leadership of Indee Labs and will add the clinical expertise of its
newest advisor, Dr. Kenneth Micklethwaite. The SAB now brings decades of
experience in driving microfluidic and cell therapy research,
development and commercialisation.

“We would like to extend a warm welcome to Dr. Micklethwaite. Dr.
Micklethwaite is Deputy Director of Sydney Cellular Therapies Laboratory
and Chair of the Advisory Committee on Biologicals at Australian
Therapeutic Goods Administration,” said Ryan Pawell – Founder, Managing
Director and Chief Executive Officer of Indee Labs America.

“Kenneth’s unique expertise with open source CAR-T will be most valuable
at this critical time as the United
States Food and Drug Administration expects more than 200
Investigational New Drug submissions for gene and cell therapies per
year by 2020 and 10 to 20 new approvals annually by 2025.”

To date, Indee Labs team has made many remarkable discoveries for the
field of gene and cell therapies, which will be further developed under
the leadership of the SAB:

Pioneering its intracellular delivery technology, microfluidic
vortex shedding (“µVS”), as a patented alternative
to non-viral cell transfection that is both scalable and gentle on
cells.
High yield, rapid transfection of mRNA to human
primary T-cells with negligible perturbation, peer-reviewed by Nature
Publishing Group.
More recently, the efficient delivery of plasmid DNA to human primary
T-cells.
Developing an open source or out-licensable, non-viral platform for
CAR-T requiring genomic integration in collaboration with Dr.
Micklethwaite.

The Strategic Advisory Board is comprised of the following members:

Heidi
Hagen, MSc MBA is Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of
Vineti — the essential software solution to drive and scale
personalized therapeutic innovation. Heidi is a seasoned Biotechnology
and Operations executive. She has successfully built organizations and
programs within both established and start up environments,
commercialized innovative operations, designed and built commercial
manufacturing facilities, and streamlined complicated logistics and
production systems. She successfully delivered the first operation that
manufactures and distributes live autologous cellular products within an
18 hour time window to oncology patients in the American and European
commercial markets at Dendreon and was previously Chief Operation
Officer at Sotio.

Dr.
Geoff Facer, PhD is the Vice President at Levitas Bio.
Levitas Bio is advancing science and human health by providing
researchers with a new and powerful method of cellular analysis based on
a proprietary Magnetic Levitation Technology. Geoff is an R&D leader
with broad hands-on experience in all stages of the product development
cycle and has driven multiple startups to acquisition. Geoff is also
responsible for orchestrating the single largest patent filing of all
time filing of all time based on a bioMEMS device — 354 patent
applications in 1 day with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Professor
David Gottlieb is the Professor of Haematology at the
University of Sydney. He has been actively involved in clinical stem
cell transplantation for over 25 years and is currently a senior
physician on the Westmead Hospital Blood and Marrow Transplant Unit and
the Medical Director of the Sydney Cellular Therapies Laboratory. His
research interests are in the field of cell and gene therapy especially
in the manipulation of the immune system post-transplant to reduce
opportunistic infection and recurrence of malignant disease. He is
currently directing a number of clinical studies of donor-derived and
third party antigen specific T-cells given to rapidly reconstitute
immunity in the post-stem cell transplant setting.

Dr.
Kenneth Micklethwaite, MBBS, PhD is Chair of the Advisory
Committee on Biologicals for Australia’s Therapeutics Goods
Administration. Ken is also the Research Group Leader for Cancer
Research at the Westmead Institute and is a haematologist and blood and
marrow stem cell transplant physician at Westmead Hospital. He is Deputy
Director of the Sydney Cellular Therapies Laboratory, assisting in
running the largest stem cell transplant and clinical cell and gene
therapy facilities in New South Wales, Australia (as part of the Sydney
Cell and Gene Therapy group at Westmead), with an active research
interest in immune therapy of infections and cancer.

Hamish
Hawthorn is Chief Operating Officer at UpGuard, which helps
security, risk and vendor management teams take control of cyber risk
and move faster with confidence. Hamish has been immersed in the world
of startups and deep technology commercialisation for over 2 decades.
His experience spans the biomedical and biotechnology sectors, through
to hardware and software industries. He has been deeply involved in the
development of the Australian and American startup ecosystems. Hamish is
particularly focussed on the development of capability in the founders
of deep technology ventures and co-founded Sydney Angels.

Ben
Wright is Chief Innovation Officer of Cicada Innovations
— Australia’s home of deep technology startups. Cicada Innovations
unlocks the power to create the industries of the future addressing some
of the most pressing global issues that face our world today. Ben is an
execution focused professional with 2 decades of experience in research
and development, regulatory, clinical trials, operations, finance and
commercialisation within both private and public deep technology
businesses.

About Indee Labs

Indee Labs is developing scalable hardware for intracellular delivery
using microfluidic vortex shedding (µVS). The Indee Labs team has
already demonstrated revolutionary
improvements over existing intracellular delivery methods including
scalability, high yield (i.e. recovery, viability and efficiency),
negligible T-cell perturbation along with rapid processing of research-,
clinical- and commercial-scale samples with a simple workflow and a
small footprint. These promising early results have led to various forms
of seed-stage support in both Australia (i.e. Australian
National Fabrication Facility, Defense
Science and Technology, NSW
Health, Cicada
Innovations, Jobs
for NSW, AusTrade
San Francisco Landing Pad, AusIndustry,
Main
Sequence Ventures, MTP
Connect BioMedTech Horizons, Australian
Research Council IDEAL Hub and NSW
Health Medical Device Fund) and the United States (i.e. Obama’s
White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force, Air
Force Office of Scientific Research, Air
Force Research Laboratory, National
Institutes of Health, National
Cancer Institute, QB3,
IndieBio/SOSV,
Y
Combinator, Social
Capital, Founders
Funds’ FF Science, and Axial).
Indee
Labs would like to hear from biotechnology and pharmaceutical
companies discovering, developing and commercialising gene-modified cell
therapies like CAR-T. More information is available at indeelabs.com.