On February 19, 2022, Guangzhou Envision Immunology Biotechnology Co., LTD. (Envision Immunology) announced that its co-founder and director, Dr. Pan Zheng, has been elected as a 2022 Fellow by the American Academy of Medicine and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). For their outstanding contributions to the development of immune checkpoint modulators in cancer immunotherapy and the treatment of COVID-19.
Members of the American Academy of Medicine and Bioengineering are nominated and selected annually by international peers (recommended by existing academicians, screened in two rounds, and finally voted by all academicians), which is the highest academic honor in the field of medicine and bioengineering technology in the United States.
The American Academy of Medicine and Bioengineering is a college of outstanding talents founded in 1991 with the mission of bridging engineering with life sciences and medicine. It is a well-known non-profit academic organization in the field of international medical and biological engineering, bringing together the world's medical and biological engineering elites, including 3 Nobel Prize winners, 18 U.S. Presidential Award winners, 195 members of the American Academy of Engineering, 94 members of the American Academy of Medicine and 43 members of the American Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Cheng will be formally inducted during the AIMBE 2022 annual event in March. The recognition from this prestigious academic organization is also a testament to the depth of innovation behind Onco's new immunotherapies. These treatments are the culmination of decades of scientific pursuit by our co-founders. We congratulate Dr. Zheng on this significant achievement and look forward to continuing to advance many more of our exciting clinical programs under her leadership, from early development through clinical evaluation."
About Dr. Chang Pan and Oncor Immunity
Dr. Cheng has spent more than 20 years as a professor at various universities in the United States, beginning at the Ohio State University Medical Center and continuing to the University of Michigan, Children's National Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine. In addition to his academic success, Dr. Zheng has invested heavily in technology development and commercialization, co-founding Guangzhou Aoke ImmunoBiotechnology Co., Ltd. in 2018 and serving as a director.
Dr. Cheng's influence in biological and medical engineering stems from her fundamental research, with more than 150 peer-reviewed academic papers published, mostly in high-impact journals. Dr. Zheng's lab and Dr. Yang Liu's lab jointly discovered the CD24-Siglec10 interaction and its key role as an immune checkpoint that inhibits the inflammatory response to tissue damage (Science, 2009). The finding provides a theoretical framework for understanding how humans keep inflammation to a minimum of tissue damage under normal circumstances, and the devastating consequences when this pathway goes awry during infections and bone marrow transplants. Most importantly, these studies provide new treatments for graft-versus-host disease, viral infections, and autoimmune diseases, among others. Based on these findings, Dr. Zheng co-invented a new Class I drug, CD24Fc, and led OncoImmune Inc. (acquired by Merck in 2020) and Onco Immunity (Guangzhou) to initiate a series of phase I, II and III clinical studies. Treatment of graft-host disease, immunotherapy-related adverse events, HIV infection, and severe and critical COVID-19 infection.
Guangzhou Angke Immunology is jointly founded by internationally renowned scientists Dr. Liu Yang and Dr. Zheng Pan, the company is committed to the development of innovative immunotherapy drugs, focusing on the immunotherapy of malignant tumors and inflammatory diseases, the company currently has a number of Best in class and First in class I original new drug products. Among them, the flagship product, the new generation of CTLA-4 antibody drug ONC-392, has achieved a major breakthrough in clinical research, taking a leading position in the world among similar products, and the new generation of severe novel coronavirus pneumonia treatment drugs developed by Onco Immune is also rapidly advancing.
