Roquefort Therapeutics announced that the Mesodermal killer cell program has reached a significant milestone. As announced in September 2022, the Company's MK cells are a proprietary and novel class of cellular medicine. While MK cells kill cancer cells directly, their more profound effect is the activation of natural killer ("NK") cells.

As previously announced, this direct killing of cancer cells and activation of NK cells to increase cytotoxicity have each been demonstrated in validated in vivo models of lymphoma and myeloma. In the new results announced today, MK cells were tested in combination with NK cells and showed: (1) the activation of NK cells; and (2) that this activation produced up to a two-fold increase in cytotoxicity over NK cells alone in three different difficult to treat cancers, which was statistically significant* · Ovarian cancer (P<0.01) · Acute myeloid leukemia (P<0.05) · Multiple myeloma ?(P<0.01) This demonstration of the activation of NK cells in multiple cancer types including solid tumours, lymphomas and leukaemia is a significant commercial milestone because the NK cell activation is a highly attractive modality for large pharmaceutical companies. The recent transactions in this niche market include the $1.4B partnership between Sanofi and Innate Pharma[1] and >$300M Gilead and Dragonfly Therapeutics transaction for Innate and Dragonfly's proprietary activators of NK cells.

The Company's MK cells will now progress into further in vivo studies in validated models of NK cell activation and cancer cytotoxicity.