Santa Clara, Calif., April 5, 2016 — Crown Bioscience, a wholly owned subsidiary of Crown Bioscience International (TWSE: ticker 6554), a global drug discovery and development services company providing translational platforms to advance oncology and metabolic disease research, is pleased to announce that it has developed and validated a unique set of models for immuno-oncology called HuGEMM™.

“Up until now, the lack of models available to test the in vivo efficacy of new antibody-based immunotherapies and combination therapies has hindered the research process,” said Jean-Pierre Wery, Ph.D., president of Crown Bioscience. “With HuGEMM™, there is now a robust model system in place to enable scientists to assess the efficacy of human biologic therapeutics directly without resorting to mouse surrogates.”

Syngeneic mouse tumor models, commonly used for testing surrogate anti-mouse PD-1 antibodies, cannot serve as models for human-specific therapeutics. CrownBio’s HuGEMM™, which was developed by directly replacing the murine PD-1 protein with its human counterpart, can be used to evaluate human therapeutics for checkpoint inhibitors including but not limited to anti-human PD-1, anti-human PD-L1 and anti-human CTLA-4 antibodies.

With the inclusion of the HuGEMM™ models, CrownBio solidifies its role as a leader in the preclinical immuno-oncology space. HuGEMM™ joins a portfolio of well-established translational model platforms, including the collection of HuPrime^® cancer models available through the company’s HuBase^® annotated database.

The HuGEMM™ models were developed in collaboration with CrownBio’s partner, Nanjing Galaxy Biopharmaceutical Co., Ltd. The partnership of CrownBio and Nanjing Galaxy is expected to continue to advance both organizations’ research capabilities in immuno-oncology.