WARREN, N.J.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Tevogen Bio, a late-stage biotechnology company specializing in developing cell and gene therapies in oncology, neurology, and virology, today announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Kendell R. Sprott, M.D., J.D., to its Corporate Advisory Board. Most recently, Dr. Sprott served six years as President and CEO at Matheny Medical and Educational Center, which provides care and enhances the quality of life for individuals with special needs and medically complex developmental disabilities. Dr. Sprott, a member of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School for 30 years, has dedicated more than four decades of his life to the pediatric healthcare practice.
The Corporate Advisory Board provides guidance to Tevogen leadership as the company continues to expand its genetically unmodified precision T cell platform technology, which maintains the promise of affordable and convenient cell therapies for large patient populations by overcoming existing barriers of T cell-based therapeutic platforms.
“I am delighted to join this impassioned and highly skilled team whose guiding mission is to provide accessible life-saving immunotherapies to large patient populations,” said Dr. Sprott. He continued, “It is particularly great to be joining Tevogen now, as it has invented what I call a leapfrog technology. The company’s single HLA restricted, multiple target-specific and genetically unmodified cytotoxic CD8+ approach introduces high level precision and specificity avoiding unwanted corollary effects observed in other T cell immunotherapy platforms. It is one of those scientific advances that is quite remarkable in its simplicity.”
“Dr. Sprott is the epitome of excellence in the health care practice, and I deeply admire his passion to limit suffering in children as well as his dedication to improving the lives of all people. His extensive, distinguished, and illustrious career speaks for itself, and I am honored to have him join Tevogen’s Corporate Advisory Board,” said Tevogen CEO Ryan Saadi, M.D., M.P.H.
Prior to serving six years as President and CEO of the acclaimed Matheny Medical and Educational Center, Dr. Sprott was a member of the faculty at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School for 30 years, beginning in 1984, and served as Senior Associate Dean of Clinical Affairs as well as Acting Chair of the Department of Pediatrics. Dr. Sprott was also Vice Chair and Director of Community Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of New Jersey at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.
Dr. Sprott also served in the Department of Pediatrics at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, NJ, Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield, NJ, and Children’s Hospital of New Jersey. He was Chair of the Governor’s Council of Children’s Service Planning from July 1989 – May 1994 and was a recipient of the Thurgood Marshall Award for Excellence (2005), City News 100 Most Influential in New Jersey (1997), the Golden Apple Award for Teaching Excellence (1995), and the Child Advocacy Award from the National Black Child Development Institute (1990). He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Rutgers Community Health Foundation, Life Camp, and Advocates for Children of New Jersey.
Dr. Sprott received a B.S. degree from Morehouse College in Atlanta, his M.D. from UMDNJ New Jersey Medical School (now Rutgers) and his J.D. degree from the Rutgers School of Law in Newark, NJ.
About Tevogen’s Next Generation Precision T Cell Platform
Tevogen’s next generation precision T cell platform is designed to provide increased specificity to eliminate malignant and virally infected cells, while allowing healthy cells to remain intact. Targets are selected in advance with the goal of overcoming mutational capacity of cancer cells and viruses.
Tevogen is investigating its technology’s potential to overcome the primary barriers to the broad application of personalized T cell therapies: potency, purity, production-at-scale, and patient-pairing, without the limitations of current approaches. Tevogen’s goal is to open the vast and unprecedented potential of developing personalized immunotherapies for large patient populations impacted by common cancers and viral infections.
The company’s lead product, TVGN-489, is currently in clinical trial for high-risk COVID-19 patients at Jefferson University Hospitals in Philadelphia. TVGN-489 is a highly purified, genetically unmodified, off-the-shelf, allogeneic SARS-CoV-2-specific cytotoxic CD8+ T lymphocyte (CTL) product designed to detect targets spread across the entire viral genome.
Tevogen recently announced the initiation of the fourth and final dose level of its investigational T cell therapy for high-risk COVID-19 patients in the proof of concept clinical trial of TVGN-489. No dose limiting toxicities or treatment-related adverse events, including Cytokine Release Syndrome (CRS), have been observed to date in any of the cohorts. Enrollment is expected to conclude in the second quarter of 2022.
About Tevogen Bio
Tevogen Bio is driven by a team of distinguished scientists and highly experienced biopharmaceutical leaders who have successfully developed and commercialized multiple franchises. Tevogen’s leadership believes that accessible personalized immunotherapies are the next frontier of medicine, and that disruptive business models are required to sustain medical innovation in the post-pandemic world.
