Kling Biotherapeutics Strengthens Leadership Team to Advance Pipeline Using its Proprietary Primary B-Cell Selection and Evolution Platform

• Alessandra Micaela Villa appointed Director of Platform Development
• Rob Roovers appointed Director of Preclinical Development

AMSTERDAM, Dec. 10, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Kling Biotherapeutics ("Kling" or "the Company"), a biotech company developing antibody-based drugs for cancer and infectious diseases, today announces the appointments of Alessandra Micaela Villa as Director of Platform Development and Rob Roovers as Director of Preclinical Development, as it strengthens its leadership team to progress its pipeline across cancer and infectious diseases.

Alessandra joins from Molecular Partners, a clinical-stage biotech company developing a new class of custom-built protein drugs known as DARPins. Rob was previously head of preclinical development at LAVA Therapeutics, a clinical-stage immuno-oncology company focused on developing its proprietary Gammabody ® platform of bispecific gamma delta T cell engagers.

Michael Koslowski, Chief Executive Officer at Kling Biotherapeutics, said: "Alessandra and Rob's appointments come at a pivotal time of growth and development for Kling. By utilizing our groundbreaking commercially validated primary B-cell selection and evolution platform to identify therapeutic antibodies from B-cells of 'exceptional responders', we are laser-focused on developing best-in-class therapeutics for cancer and infectious diseases."

Prior to Molecular Partners, Alessandra led the Antibody Research and Phage Display Technology to design and develop anti-cancer immunocytokines from R&D into IND-enabling studies. Alessandra has a PhD in the Generation and Engineering of Therapeutic Antibodies for Tumour Targeting from ETH-Zürich and holds an MSc in Industrial Biotechnology from Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca.

Before his time at LAVA Therapeutics, Rob worked at Merus, where he co-developed Merus' bispecifics, of which two are on the verge of being registered drugs. He has a PhD in Antibody Engineering and Development in Oncology from the University of Maastricht, after which he completed his postdoctoral studies at the Dutch Cancer Institute and Utrecht University. Rob holds an MSc in Cell/Cellular and Molecular Biology and Immunology from the Radboud University in Nijmegen.

About Kling Biotherapeutics

Kling Biotherapeutics is a privately held biotech company focused on the discovery and development of novel targets and therapeutics. The Company is headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands with a fully owned IP portfolio that covers its proprietary platform technologies Kling-Select and Kling-Evolve for the simultaneous discovery of novel, fully human antibodies directly from patient-derived B cells and the targets they recognize.

Kling-Select relies on a fully-owned and clinically validated B cell immortalization and screening technology to identify novel therapeutic antibody binders and targets from patients with exceptional clinical responses. This technology has successfully identified novel neutralizing antibodies for various infectious diseases such as RSV (nirsevimab/Beyfortus), Covid, and Influenza. More recently, Kling-Select has been applied to peripheral and tumor-infiltrating B cells derived from cancer patients and produced a portfolio of novel and selective antibody-target pairs. The unbiased nature of this discovery platform allows identification of novel targets and unique epitopes inaccessible to more traditional target discovery approaches.

Kling-Evolve enables the ex vivo affinity maturation of B cell clones against targets of interest. This powerful technology can be used for the rapid evolution of neutralizing antibodies against emerging viral variants or for affinity and selectivity improvement of antibody assets in oncology.