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All Patients' Immune Systems Were Capable of Recognizing Mutations Within Their Tumors Patients Who Benefitted from Treatment Mounted Diverse Immune Responses Against a Small Number of Cancer-Specific Targets; Non-Responders Showed Limited Responses that Were Not Diverse Findings Provide Key Insight into What Individual Patient's Immune Systems See in Cancers to Result in Clinical Responses to Cancer Immunotherapy, Highlighting Power of PACT's Cutting-Edge TCR-T Cell Technology Platform SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., March 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- PACT Pharma, Inc., a privately held biopharmaceutical company developing transformational personalized neoantigen-specific and off-the-shelf T cell receptor (TCR)-T cell therapies for the eradication of solid tumors, today announced the publication of a peer-reviewed paper in Nature in collaboration with researchers at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) detailing groundbreaking work characterizing and differentiating the immune responses of melanoma patients treated with anti PD-1 immunotherapy. Researchers showed that patients who benefitted from anti-PD-1 treatment generated a diverse (polyclonal) repertoire of T cells that recognized a small group of immunodominant mutations in their tumor. These immune responses expanded and evolved in the tumor and in the peripheral blood throughout treatment. Patients who did not respond to anti-PD-1 therapy also harbored T cells that recognized their tumor-specific mutations, but their immune responses were less diverse (monoclonal) and did not expand during treatment. These first-of-their-kind findings not only provide critical understanding into differentiated patient responses to treatment, but also offer insight into strategies for potentially designing novel T cell therapies and diagnostics. "These study findings are exciting as they show the unique, patient-specific manner in which T cell responses take shape and impact disease. This new insight has broad implications on how we think about T cell responses and how we might be able to manipulate these responses to achieve desired therapeutic outcomes," said Stefanie Mandl, Ph.D., chief scientific officer, PACT Pharma. To conduct this first-of-its-kind research, the investigators utilized two of PACT's core platform technologies: First, the company's ImPACT Isolation Technology® was used to isolate mutation-reactive T cells from patients' blood and tumor samples. It is important to note that blood proved equally adept in assessing tumor-specific T cell responses as tumor biopsies, underscoring the relevance of blood as a minimally invasive source for the isolation of tumor targeting TCRs and monitoring tumor-mutation specific T cell responses. Next, investigators leveraged the company's PACT^NV™ technology to generate tumor-specific TCR-T cells using CRISPR gene replacement so that they would express the mutation-reactive T cell receptors that were isolated from patients treated with PD-1 blockade therapy. The engineered T cells were then expanded to large numbers and used by investigators to functionally characterize each individual patient's immune responses. The study was conducted in eleven patients with metastatic melanoma. The results showed that the T cells engineered to express a specific patients' isolated TCRs were able to guide an attack on that same patients' tumor cells. This was true regardless of whether the patient responded to treatment or not. This shows that those patients who do not respond to anti-PD-1 therapy do have T cells that can recognize and kill their own tumor cells, they are just not doing so in a diverse and expansive enough manner. Based on this finding, these patients could benefit from personalized adoptive cell therapy in which their tumor-specific TCRs are isolated and then used to engineer large numbers of T cells capable of directing more effective immune responses against their own tumor. "While this particular study was conducted in patients with metastatic melanoma treated with anti-PD-1 therapy, it provides a framework for our core platforms to be deployed for studying the mechanism of action and related patient responses for immuno-oncology therapies, vaccines and across a range of T cell-related diseases," said Dr. Mandl. "This important advance further supports the learnings from our Phase 1 clinical trial using our same proprietary TCR-T cell technologies for the development of personalized therapies for the treatment of patients with cancer, the findings of which were also published in Nature late last year. Taken together, these studies and their respective papers offer a glimpse into the potential power of technologies that enable us to push the boundaries of analyzing TCR-T cell responses and developing personalized TCR-T cell therapeutics." A copy of the newly published Nature article, entitled, "Neoantigen-targeted CD8+ T-cell responses with PD-1 blockade therapy," can be accessed at: A copy of the previously published Nature paper reporting the results of PACT's Phase 1 trial can be accessed at: . About PACT Pharma, Inc. PACT is a privately held biopharmaceutical company pioneering individualized and off-the-shelf, non-viral precision genome engineered, tumor specific TCR-T cell therapies for the treatment of patients with solid cancers. For more information, please visit . Contacts: PACT Pharma Susan Whitehead [email protected] Vida Strategic Partners (on behalf of PACT Pharma) Tim Brons (Media) 415-675-7402 [email protected] SOURCE PACT Pharma

Oral and Poster Presentations Highlight Feasibility of Creating, Manufacturing, and Administering Non-Viral Precision Genome Engineered Tumor Specific T Cell Therapies for Solid Tumors SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Nov. 2, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- PACT Pharma, Inc., a privately held biopharmaceutical company developing transformational personalized neoantigen-specific and off-the-shelf T cell receptor (TCR) T cell therapies for the eradication of solid tumors, today announced that new data highlighting its first-of-its-kind adoptive T cell therapy platform will be featured in multiple presentations at the upcoming 37th Annual Meeting of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2022). The company, along with academic research collaborators, will deliver oral and poster presentations, including a late-breaking oral presentation, providing the latest clinical and preclinical findings from its pioneering research in the field of personalized neoantigen TCR T cell therapies. SITC 2022 is being held November 8-12, 2022, in Boston, Massachusetts. Details of the company's presentations at SITC 2022 are as follows: Late Breaking Oral Presentation #1478 (With Accompanying Poster): Title: A Phase I Study of Personalized Adoptive TCR T Cell Therapy in Patients with Solid Tumors: Safety, Efficacy, and T Cell Trafficking to Tumors of Non-virally Gene Edited T Cells Presenting Author: Stefanie Mandl, Ph.D., chief scientific officer, PACT Pharma Category/Session: Late Breaking Abstract Session 103 Date/Time: Thursday, November 10, 2022, 11:10 a.m. – 11:40 a.m. Eastern Location: Hall B2 Oral Presentation #123: Title: Landscape Analysis of the Neoepitope-specific T Cell Responses in Patients with and without Clinical Benefit from Immune Checkpoint Blockade Therapy Presenting Author: Cristina Puig Saus, Ph.D., adjunct assistant professor, University of California, Los Angeles Category/Session: Rapid Oral Abstracts – Basic Science Session 104 Date/Time: Thursday, November 10, 2022, 12:25 – 12:33 p.m. Eastern Location: 253ABC Poster Presentation #320: Title: Rapid Identification of a TCR Library Targeting the HPV E6/E7 Oncoproteins to Enable Multi-TCR T-Cell Therapies for Patients with HPV16+ Epithelial Cancers Presenting Author: Stefanie Mandl, Ph.D., chief scientific officer, PACT Pharma Category/Session: Cellular Therapies Poster Session Date: Friday, November 11, 2022 Location: Poster Hall C Poster Presentation #712: Title: Retrospective Tumor Microenvironment Analysis from a Personalized neoTCR-T Cell Therapy Clinical Trial and Its Potential Applications for Off-the-Shelf HPV TCR T Cell therapies Presenting Author: Chad Smith, Ph.D., associate director, bioinformatics, PACT Pharma Category/Session: Clinical Trials in Progress Poster Session Date: Friday, November 11, 2022 Location: Poster Hall C Additional information on the 37th Annual Meeting of SITC is available through the conference website at: About PACT Pharma, Inc. PACT is a privately held biopharmaceutical company pioneering individualized and off-the-shelf, non-viral precision genome engineered, tumor-specific TCR T cell therapies for the treatment of patients with solid cancers. For more information, please visit . Contacts: PACT Pharma Atulya R. Agarwal aagarwal@pactpharma.com Vida Strategic Partners (on behalf of PACT Pharma) Tim Brons (Media) 415-675-7402 tbrons@vidasp.com

PACT Pharma has not announced additional financing since closing a $75 million series C round in January 2020. PACT Pharma is selling off a handful of assets plus its South San Francisco facility to contract research organization AmplifyBio in a bid to raise additional cash. Details about what was exactly included in the exchange were a bit piecemeal, but Monday’s announcement said PACT was handing over “advanced characterization platforms and bioinformatics capabilities.” In addition to the South San Francisco real estate, Amplify will also acquire a “number of technical operations and product characterization domain experts.” There was no dollar amount included in the announcement, but PACT said the deal allows it to “improve its overall financial position.”  “The sale of these select assets to AmplifyBio provides the company with meaningful capital while reducing our operating expenses," PACT CEO Scott Garland said in a release.  In emails to Fierce Biotech, Garland and PACT's chief legal and business strategy officer, Atulya Agarwal, Ph.D., confirmed the deal was tied to the diversion of some 54 employees toward a new venture in late August. Agarwal said the number of impacted employees was ultimately a “little less than 54 employees due to a bit of attrition,” but was close. Nonetheless, the staffers that were redirected came from a group of 94 originally slated to be laid off according to a California workforce disclosure made public earlier in the summer.  From Amplify’s side, that company's announcement said it will acquire 40 “drug development experts.” In PACT’s disclosure to the California Employment Development Department, the company reported shifting a variety of positions, including six scientists, six directors and two vice presidents.  The deal with Amplify keeps PACT’s R&D capabilities in-house, allowing it to continue developing its neoantigen-focused pipeline. In August, the company disclosed it was ending a phase 1 trial of its NeoTCR-P1 cell therapy, which Garland said at the time was done to focus instead on “shared neoantigens.” The company says it plans to ask regulators to enter clinical testing sometime in 2023. Although PACT says this deal helps shore up its cash reserve, how much remains in the company’s financial reservoir remains murky. The last public release from the company came in January 2020 when it said it closed a $75 million series C round.