10 June 2019 - - US-based immunotherapy company NantKwest (NASDAQ: NK) has appointed Cheryl L. Cohen to the board of directors of NantKwest, effective immediately, the company said.
Since 2008, Cohen has served as president of CLC Consulting, a pharmaceutical and biotechnology consulting firm specializing in new product start-up and commercialization.
Prior to CLC, Cohen served as chief commercial officer of Medivation, Inc., a publicly-traded bio-pharmaceutical company, from September 2011 until July 2014.
From November 2007 to September 2008, she served as the vice president, strategic commercial group, of Health Care Systems, Inc., a Johnson and Johnson company, and from October 1998 to November 2007, she worked at Janssen Biotech, Inc. (formerly Centocor Biotech, Inc.), a Johnson and Johnson company, in a variety of senior sales roles including vice president, rheumatology franchise.
In addition, Cohen served on the board of Aerpio Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a pharmaceutical company, since 2018 and also served on the board of Vital Therapies, Inc., a therapeutics company, from 2015 until 2019.
Since 2015, Cohen has served on the board of Novus Therapeutics, Inc. (reverse merger of Tokai Pharmaceuticals, Inc.), a publicly-traded pharmaceutical company focused on the acquisition, development, and commercialisation of ear, nose, and throat products and served on the board of Protein Sciences Corp., a privately held bio-pharmaceutical company specialising in vaccine development from October 2014 to August 2017.
She served on the board of Cytrx Corp., a bio-pharmaceutical company specialising in oncology, from June 2015 through October 2016.
Cohen began her career at Solvay Pharmaceuticals in a variety of sales positions and received her B.A. from Saint Joseph College.
NantKwest, a member of the NantWorks ecosystem of companies, is an innovative clinical-stage immunotherapy company.
NantKwest is positioned to implement precision cancer medicine, with the potential to change the current paradigm of cancer care.
Natural Killer cells are a safeguard in the human body designed to recognise and detect cells under stress due to cancer or viral infection. NantKwest's "off-the-shelf" activated NK cell platform is designed to destroy cancer and virally infected cells from the body.
The safety of our NK cells as well as their activity against a range of cancers have been tested in phase I clinical trials in Canada and Europe as well as in multiple phase I and II clinical trials in the United States.
In addition to being a universal cell-based therapy that does not require individualised patient sourcing or matching, its NK cell products have been largely administered in the outpatient setting as an "off-the-shelf" living drug.