NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - November 18, 2010) - ContraFect Corporation, the company that is pioneering the use of recombinant proteins for the treatment of drug resistant bacteria, announced that it has licensed from The Rockefeller University a suite of eight patents to Lysin (anti-bacterial) enzymes.

Lysins are enzymes that dissolve and kill tens of millions of bacteria in seconds. Each Lysin is specific to a single type of bacteria and does not cause the side effects or drug resistance that commonly occur with antibiotics and renders them ineffective. Lysins are remarkably safe, reacting only with targeted bacteria and have no effect on human cells.

Robert Nowinski, CEO and Chairman of ContraFect said, "We believe that there are 12 to 14 potential products that may come from these patents. The Lysins in the agreement cover drug-resistant staph (MRSA) as well as group B streptococcus, pneumococcus, enterococcus, and anthrax. These bacteria cause infections such as pneumonia, meningitis, ear infections in children, and serious infections of the intestine." The eight patents are based on research conducted by Dr. Vincent Fischetti at The Rockefeller University, who is the first scientist to produce recombinant Lysins for therapeutic and prophylactic use.

The combination of Lysins and Monoclonal Antibodies provide ContraFect with a unique therapeutic approach. Lysins possess a therapeutic window that occurs virtually instantly while the Monoclonal Antibodies remain in the blood stream for weeks and provide long-term benefit. This combined approach is of particular importance in treating drug-resistant bacteria.

Dr. Nowinski concluded, "We believe the use of Lysins and Monoclonal Antibodies for the treatment of life-threatening infectious diseases will have significant implications for the treatment of a variety of diseases, particularly MRSA which has become the most significant infection in the hospital and now is responsible for more deaths in the United States than HIV."

ContraFect previously announced that it had successfully raised $14.2 million in Series A and B financings for research and development of its proprietary Lysin and Monoclonal Antibody technologies.

ContraFect is a biotech company pioneering the use of monoclonal antibodies and lysins (enzymes that digest the key component of bacteria, the cell wall) to treat life-threatening infectious diseases including MRSA and viruses such as influenza. The fledgling company, which moved to Yonkers, N.Y., in late 2010, has ambitious expansion plans at its new headquarters, which formerly housed Otis Elevator's manufacturing operations.

"We started as a virtual company in a small office in Manhattan with a couple of people," says [Dr. Robert Charles Nowinski (born 1945)], ContraFect's founder, chairman and CEO. Nowinski previously founded four biotech companies in the Seattle area which were ultimately acquired by large pharmaceutical companies.

Nowinski says while he is pleased with ContraFect's location, the company nearly wound up in Virginia.

"At the same time we looked at Yonkers, we were talking with a colleague in Virginia and were invited to come to Virginia to discuss our company," Nowinski says. "They were associated with George Mason University. The university became interested in offering us an opportunity for some space if we were willing to move the research elements of our company to Virginia. The initial plan was to create a research institute in Virginia, which would have had our company within that as one of the founders of a public-private institute on the George Mason campus."

The Virginia Legislature subsequently allocated funds for the institute, but the proposal evolved into something larger than originally planned. That caused ContraFect to re-think its position.

"The money was approved in Virginia, but as we began to put together a program, a desire developed in the Virginia Legislature to diversify the institute into not just ourselves and George Mason, but several other universities," Nowinski says. "As this became more complex, we began to see this as not as easy a task as we had anticipated."

At that point, ContraFect began reconsidering the issue of space in New York. Nowinksi returned to Yonkers to meet with Joe Cotter, founder and president of National RE/sources Group, which includes the i.park portfolio of redeveloped industrial properties. The Hudson i.park is a 24-acre (2.2-hectare) technology park in the Yonkers Waterfront District at the Yonkers Train Station. Discussions focused on the cost to build there, rent and tenant improvements.

"We are in a building that is the former Otis Elevator manufacturing plant, which is almost 100 years old," Nowinksi says. "It's a brick building that is scooped out and stands as the basic structure. As things became more complicated in Virginia, we became more interested in Yonkers, and we eventually worked out a plan with the landlord. We also completed a financing arrangement that enabled us to go forward with a larger facility than expected. We simultaneously formed other alliances in New York that suggested we would need larger lab space than initially anticipated."

Nowinski says the combination of a good arrangement with i.park and the opportunity for extensive collaboration with a New York City medical school brought Yonkers back into serious consideration. Another plus was that the building was already home to another life sciences company, Aureon Biosciences.

"We were introduced to the Yonkers economic development group and then the mayor, and in a short period of time, they began to offer various indications of assisting us," Nowinski says. "We made our decision to keep the company intact and that Yonkers would be where we would come."

ContraFect currently occupies 15,000 sq. ft (1,393 sq. m.) and employs 30. Nowinksi anticipates leasing another 22,000 sq. ft. (2,043 sq. m.) within the next several weeks. That space comes from Aureon, which filed for bankruptcy and closed in October. ContraFect also has an option on 17,500 sq. ft. (1,625 sq. m.). Nowinski expects employment to be around 45 by the end of 2012.

Nowinski says ContraFect, which was formed in late 2008, will soon be going into FDA trials with its first product. Manufacturing will initially be outsourced, but he plans to bring that process in house as the first product or two comes to market.

"The biotech industry in New York has developed relatively late," Nowinski says. "We are starting to see some growth here. Space is opening up in Manhattan with some of the large pharmaceuticals taking space to do biotech research in association with the universities there. Most of the smaller companies appear to be going into Westchester County or other areas surrounding Manhattan. We are very pleased to be in Yonkers. Ultimately we were able to get the type of space we needed, we were able to get the personnel we needed from the New York City area, which is an enormous recruiting location, and we have access to our collaborators in Manhattan."

Contrafect is a biotechnology company pioneering the use of monoclonal antibodies to treat life-threatening infectious diseases. Our scientific approach is based on the following principles:

Use Monoclonal Antibodies (MABs) for the treatment of life threatening infectious diseases bacterial as well as viral

Transition from conventional mono-therapy to a combinatorial approach using multi-therapy antibody treatment

Address the growing challenge of drug resistance and therapy escape mechanisms used by pathogens by applying monoclonal antibody multi-therapy approaches, or by choosing novel targets that are immune to the pathogens escape mechanisms

Apply Contrafect's unique approach to develop treatments to two of today's current major threats to public health:

MRSA a bacterial hospital or community acquired infection, that is antibiotic resistant and has become the 8th leading cause of death in the United States

Influenza a viral-based infection that might pose the greatest pandemic threat to the worlds public health, as demonstrated in the current Swine Flu outbreak

In recent years, the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria and viruses has become one of societys most significant medical problems. For example, infections acquired by patients in the hospital have become the 8th leading cause of death in the United States, and previous everyday infections, such as staphylococcus and influenza, now cause more deaths per year in the United States than HIV/AIDS. Moreover, since resistance to drug therapy is transmissible among microorganisms, there are an ever increasing number of serious infections with fatal outcomes. It is now stated by the FDA that within the treatments available for bacteria no antibiotics are expected to remain resistance-proof. Literally, our collection of anti-bacterial and anti-viral drugs is shrinking each year.

Currently, 65% of staph bacteria encountered in the hospital are drug-resistant (MRSA), causing serious, if not fatal, infections. One of these MRSA strains has now become a major pathogen in the community where it spreading in an epidemic manner. This community-form of MRSA has emerged as a sexually-transmitted infection in homosexual men, and most recently is found in over 30% of staph infections in the throat and ear infections of children. Influenza, thought to be a contained respiratory infection, continues to be a major cause of death despite four decades of an available vaccine. Over 125,000 patients are hospitalized with flu and approximately 40,000 die annually. To complicate matters, a new flu strain emerged this season that is resistant to the last line of drug therapy. Of yet greater concern, worldwide, is whether an exceptionally virulent avian form of influenza will fully adapt to humans and provoke a devastating pandemic.

Due to this increased occurrence of resistant pathogens in the hospital and community, it is time for a full scale effort to develop new therapeutic approaches. The ability to prepare human monoclonal antibodies (Mabs) against bacteria and viruses by new molecular methods provides a technical catalyst to accomplish this goal. Moreover, these methods (referred to as phage display) produce antibodies of extremely high potency which enables lower dosing and reduced cost.

This ease of antibody development allows for combination therapies that are directed against multiple targets on an organism. These therapeutic combinations have a multiplier effect considerably beyond that of currently using monotherapy, where one drug is used at a time. With combinations of Mabs against different gene products, no single mutation or gene replacement allows the pathogen to escape therapy. It is our working hypothesis of ContraFect that combination therapies with Mabs will emerge as the next generation of long-lasting treatments for infectious diseases.

These therapeutic approaches are novel and we know of no competitors who are using similar methods. As described here, ContraFect represents a stand-alone and unique opportunity to address the therapy of infectious diseases. Moreover, our therapeutic approaches are particularly suited to those infections which have become resistant to conventional antibiotic and drug therapy.

Our Scientific Strategy is to simultaneously attack diverse targets on any given pathogen. In this way, no single mutation or gene replacement will be able to overcome the therapeutic options and allow the pathogen to survive and multiply.

Our Mabs will be constructed by molecular means using phage display techniques. Individual Mabs will be selected for a distinct variable region that binds to a unique target antigen. Each of these variable regions will then be fused to a common constant region. The use of a common constant region (prepared in specialized bacteria as a standard cloning cassette) will ensure that the distribution and lifetime of each Mab within the patient will be nearly identical. This strategy will provide the advantages of common pharmacokinetics, safety profiles and production methods.

Of key importance is that phage display approach enables the selection of thousands of unique variable binding (V) regions from a single library of phage. This allows for the rapid identification of multiple targets for parallel attack in a microbe's life cycle. In effect, the end result is similar in approach to the drug cocktails that are used against HIV and where drug-escape becomes increasingly unlikely.

• https://web.archive.org/web/20091107124056/http://www.contrafect.com/management.html

• Robert Nowinski, Ph.D. [Dr. Robert Charles Nowinski (born 1945)]

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  • • Dr. Nowinski has founded seven biotechnology companies. He subsequently brought four of these companies public through an IPO financing. He was the first employee in each company and also held the executive position(s) of CEO and/or the Chairman of the Board. In each business he set the direction, acquired the initial technology, recruited key management and provided oversight for the research programs. He also conducted private and public financings of $110-130 million for each company. Three of the public companies have been acquired by major pharmaceutical companies: Genetic Systems in 1987 for $310 million by Bristol-Myers; PathoGenesis in 2000 for $660 million by Chiron/Novartis; and Icos in 2006 for $2.2 billion by Eli Lilly. Collectively, these companies have developed and marketed eight diagnostic tests and two therapeutic drugs (Cialis for Erectile Dysfunction and TOBI the leading drug for Cystic Fibrosis) with annual sales exceeding $3.0 billion.

    • Dr. Nowinski received his Ph.D. in immunology from the Sloan-Kettering Institute in 1971. He was an Assistant Professor of Oncology at the University of Wisconsin and then an Associate Professor of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Washington (UW). He also was a founding scientist and Head of the Virology Program of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle (FHCRC) and a Professor of Microbiology at the UW and a Member of the FHCRC. His academic research concerned cancer-causing retroviruses, leading to the naming and definition of the oncornavirus family. His studies then turned to antibody treatments for cancer and the development of antibodies for the diagnosis of sexually-transmitted diseases.

• In 2008, Dr. Nowinski and Dr. John Abeles founded ContraFect,

• John Abeles, M.D.

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  • • John Abeles, M.D., Chairman. Dr. Abeles was a Senior Medical Executive with Sterling Drug, Pfizer, Inc. and Revlon Health Care before he became a pioneering Wall Street health care analyst in 1980 focusing on biotechnology with Kidder Peabody. He is the Founder, Sole Investor, and General Partner of Northlea Partners, Ltd., and President of MedVest, Inc. Dr. Abeles has served on the Board of Directors of five public companies and six private companies. He is an advisor to numerous medical device companies and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, London.

• David Milch, M.D.

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  • • Dr. Milch is a 1980 graduate of Harvard Medical School, having completed his undergraduate studies in biology at Stanford University in 1976. Upon finishing his clinical and research responsibilities in 1984, Dr. Milch moved to New York City to pursue a business career. Between 1980 and 1989 Dr. Milch has been a principal of Bermil Industries, a closely held corporation controlled by the Milch Family, involved with capital equipment manufacture and distribution, financing, real estate development, and other entrepreneurial activities. After a portion of Bermil was sold to a public company in 1989, Dr. Milch turned a significant portion of his time and attention to venture investments in technology and the life sciences. Dr. Milch and his associates have invested in or advised on a wide variety opportunities including The American Blood Institute (private sale), Intelligent Medical Imaging (IPO), Biofield (IPO), Nitinol (IPO), Datatec Systems (reverse merger), Warp Technologies (reverse merger), MiniMed (bought by Medtronic), Advanced Bionics (bought by Boston Scientific), Theravance (IPO), and others. Recently his activity has focused on medical device companies from Israel.

• Jack H. Halperin, Esq.

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  • • Mr. Halperin has conducted a corporate and securities law practice for more than 30 years. His practice has focused on representing investors, entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial businesses. He has also served as an officer and director of numerous public and private corporations. He is lead director of I-Flow Corporation, a medical device company based in Orange County, California that has more than $100,000,000 in annual revenues. He was formerly Chairman of the Board of AccuMed International, Inc. and of Purewater Sciences International, Inc. He was formerly a director of each of Memry Corporation, IMRE Corporation, Xytronyx, Inc. and Nocopi Technologies, Inc. Mr. Halperin is a graduate of New York University School of Law where he was a Root-Tilden Scholar and Note-and-Comment Editor of the Law Review. He received a B.A. summa cum laude from Columbia College. Mr. Halperin is a member of the Nippon Club in New York and of the New York County Lawyers Association

• http://www.contrafect.com/board.html

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• Vincent A. Fischetti, Ph.D. [Dr. Vincent A Fischetti (born 1940)]

  • • [Dr. Vincent A Fischetti (born 1940)] is currently a professor and Chairman in the Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology at the Rockefeller University, New York. He has been with Rockefeller University since 1970 in various positions of increasing responsibility and prestige. He is a member of several advisory boards, including the New York Hall of Science and the New York Academy of Sciences. Dr. Fischetti also serves as Advisory Editor for several journals, has been a section editor for the Journal of Immunology and has recently retired his ten year position as Editor-in-Chief for Infection and Immunity. He is on the scientific advisory board and a Trustee of the Trudeau Institute. He earned his B.S. in Bacteriology from Wagner College in 1962 and his M.S. in Microbiology from Long Island University in 1967. In 1970 he graduated with honors with a Ph.D. from New York University School of Medicine in Microbiology.

    • Among his awards, he is the recipient of two National Institutes of Health MERIT awards. He is a member of the American Society for Microbiology, and the Kunkel Society and is the Chair of the Microbiology section of the New York Academy of Sciences. To date, Dr. Fischetti has had over 165 journal articles, more than 70 book chapters published, and 40 issued patents.

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• Peter Palese, Ph.D. [Dr. Peter Palese (born 1944)]

  • • Dr. Palese is Professor of Microbiology and Chair of the Department of Microbiology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He has over 270 scientific publications that include research on the replication of RNA-containing viruses with a special emphasis on influenza viruses, which are negative-strand RNA viruses. Specifically, he established the first genetic maps for influenza A, B and C viruses, identified the function of several viral genes, and defined the mechanism of neuraminidase inhibitors (which are now FDA-approved antivirals). Dr. Palese also pioneered the field of reverse genetics for negative strand RNA viruses, which allows the introduction of site-specific mutations into the genomes of these viruses. This technique is crucial for the study of the structure/function relationships of viral genes, for investigation of viral pathogenicity and for development and manufacture of novel vaccines. In addition, an improvement of the technique has been effectively used by him and his colleagues to reconstruct and study the pathogenicity of the highly virulent but extinct 1918 pandemic influenza virus.

    • His recent work in collaboration with Garcia-Sastre has revealed that most negative strand RNA viruses possess proteins with interferon antagonist activity, enabling them to counteract the antiviral response of the infected host. Dr. Palese was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 for his seminal studies on influenza viruses. At present he serves on the editorial board for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and as an editor for the Journal of Virology. Dr. Palese was president of the Harvey Society in 2004, president of the American Society for Virology in 2005 and he was a recipient of the Robert Koch Prize in 2006 and of the Charles C. Shepard Science Award in 2008.

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• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gCE6CpeIVBUDmE36kQhxp84-Xg94OC65/view?usp=sharing

• Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, Ph.D. [ Dr. Adolfo Garcia-Sastre (born 1964)]

  • • Dr. Garcia-Sastre is Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Co-Director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. For the past 20 years, his research interest has been focused on the molecular biology of influenza viruses and several other negative strand RNA viruses. During his post-doctoral training in the early 1990s, he developed, for the first time, novel strategies for expression of foreign antigens by a negative strand RNA virus, influenza virus. He has made major contributions to the influenza virus field, including 1) the development of reverse genetics techniques allowing the generation of recombinant influenza viruses from plasmid DNA; 2) the generation and evaluation of negative strand RNA virus vectors as potential vaccine candidates against different infectious diseases, including malaria and AIDS, and 3) the identification of the biological role of the non structural protein NS1 of influenza virus during infection: the inhibition of the type I interferon (IFN) system.

    • His research has resulted in more than 200 scientific publications and reviews; in addition, Dr. Garcia is a member of the Editorial Board of PLOS Pathogens, Journal of Virology, Virology, Journal of General Virology and Virus Research. Dr. Garcia is a co-leader of the basic research component on Viral Therapeutics and Pathogenesis of the North East Biodefense Center. Dr. Garcia-Sastre is also the director of the Center for Research on Influenza Pathogenesis, one of the six NIAID funded Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance. His publication in Science on the reconstruction and characterization of the pandemic influenza virus of 1918 has been awarded with the distinction of the paper of the year 2005 by Lancet.

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• Christoph Renner, M.D.

  • • Dr. Renner serves as the Acting Director for the Department of Hematology at the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. He is also the Group Leader for the Department of Oncology, as well as a professor for Experimental and Clinical Oncology at the University of Zurich, where he oversees research in the areas of tumor antigen discovery, antibody engineering, tumor targeting and phage display. He is a key investigator with the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research where he has defined several immunological targets for cancer therapy. As an expert in molecular immunology, Dr. Renner has published over 75 articles and reviews in several of the worlds leading scientific journals. He has also contributed chapters to a dozen cancer-related textbooks and letters. At this time, Dr. Renner is the holder of four patents in antibody research and holds two others related to RP1 regulation in T-cells and G250 fusion proteins. Dr. Renner completed his undergraduate studies in Chemistry at the University of Cologne in Germany, while also working towards his M.D. which he received from the University of Cologne Medical School in 1993.