Torque Expands Leadership Team with Appointment of Thomas Andresen, PhD, as Chief Scientific Officer

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 10, 2018— Torque, an immuno-oncology company developing Deep Primed™ cellular therapies with pharmacologic control to direct immune power deep within the tumor microenvironment, announced today the appointment of Thomas Andresen, PhD, as Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Andresen joins Torque from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), where he built an internationally renowned center for advanced materials engineering and focused his lab on creating novel oncology therapeutics. He is also a co-founder of Torque.

“We have built the Deep Priming platform on scientific innovations at the interface of advanced materials and biological engineering to create cellular drugs with directed immune power,” said Ulrik Nielsen, President of Torque. “Thomas brings enormous vision and experience in applying advanced materials engineering to oncology, including the fields of TLR agonists and antigen priming. We look forward to his leadership to advance our pipeline and the Deep-Priming technology platform.”

“As a Torque co-founder, I have seen tremendous progress in building the Deep-Priming technology platform and pipeline of cellular drugs to treat solid and hematologic tumors,” said Dr. Andresen. “My research with TLR agonists and antigen-priming technologies, combined with the Torque platform, has the potential to make a dramatic impact in the treatment of cancer. I am very excited about the opportunity before us, and I believe our approach will become foundational in immunotherapy.”

Dr. Andresen brings to Torque more than 20 years of research and development expertise in the fields of advanced materials engineering and cancer biology. Prior to joining Torque, Dr. Andresen held positions at the prestigious Technical University of Denmark (DTU) since 2007, including Professor and Head of Department at DTU Nanotech and Head of the DTU Center for Nanomedicine and Theranostics. Dr. Andresen has founded several cancer medical technology and biotechnology companies in Europe focused on chemotherapy and radiation therapy and has pioneered multiple technologies that are in ongoing clinical trials.

About Deep-Primed™ Immune Cell Therapeutics

Torque’s Deep-Priming platform is based on 10 years of research and development to combine very potent immunomodulatory drugs with T cells to drive a powerful immune response with pharmacologic control in the tumor microenvironment. We are developing Deep-Primed T cells using a focused set of immunomodulators—initially IL-15, IL-12 and TLR agonists—that activate both innate and adaptive immunity. Administering these immunomodulators systemically to a patient can cause lethal toxicity by activating immune cells throughout the body. Deep-Primed therapeutics are designed to activate T cells and focus the immune response to target the tumor, without systemic exposure. This is achieved by:

• Anchoring the immunomodulators to the surface of T cells to activate and direct the immune response in the tumor microenvironment
• Modular antigen priming of T cells to target multiple, tumor-associated antigens using a proprietary cell-processing technology

In hematologic cancers, this new class of immune therapeutics has the potential to improve on the initial success of single-target CAR-T therapeutics. For solid tumors, Deep-Primed T-cells have the potential to enable efficacy against tumors with heterogeneous antigens protected by hostile microenvironments, which are not readily addressable with the first generation of immune cell therapies.

About Torque (www.torquetx.com)

Torque is an immuno-oncology company developing Deep Primed™ cell therapeutics with pharmacologic control to direct immune power deep within the tumor microenvironment. Torque’s lead product candidate is Deep IL-15, which is in pre-IND development for hematologic and solid tumors. The company is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.