KITE Treats First Patient With CAR T-cell Therapy in Early Stage Trial

Kite Pharma, Inc. is announcing today that the first patient in its Phase 1/2 clinical trial of KTE-C19 in patients with refractory aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma has begun treated.

Typically this kind of press release is hardly newsworthy, but in this case, it is very newsworthy and very relevant to cancer patients.

KTE-C19 is a form of CAR T-cell therapy, one of the most exciting and promising therapeutic pathways in cancer treatment.

Specifically, KTE-C19 is an investigational therapy in which a patient's T cells are genetically modified to express a CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) designed to target the antigen CD19, a protein expressed on the cell surface of B-cell lymphomas and leukemias.

"This is a very exciting time for Kite, and we're grateful to the patients and clinical researchers who greatly contribute to the progress of our KTE-C19 program," said Arie Belldegrun, M.D., FACS, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer. "We are at a pivotal moment for our Company and for the industry as a whole as we initiate the first company-sponsored clinical trial of CAR T-cell therapy in patients with refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL)."

Kite's Phase 1/2 clinical trial of KTE-C19 is a single arm, open-label, multi-center study, designed to determine the safety and efficacy of KTE-C19 in patients with:

• Refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma
• Primary mediastinal B-cell lymphoma (PMBCL)
• Transformed follicular lymphoma (TFL)

.

Upon completion of the Phase 1 portion of the study, Kite expects to proceed with the Phase 2 portion that will include a total of approximately 112 patients.

If you would like to learn more about this study, follow this link at ClinicalTrials.gov: clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02348216