Helge Bastian, PhD, joins executive team as new CEO.

SAN DIEGO — iXCells Biotechnologies USA, Inc. (“iXCells”), a cell technology company specializing in providing cell-based products and drug discovery service solutions to the global academic, biotech, pharmaceutical, and rare disease communities, today announced the appointment of Helge Bastian, PhD, as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer.

The company’s co-founder and former CEO, Lynn Zhang, commented, “iXCells has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past few years adding talented scientists and commercial staff, building infrastructure for scalable growth, and expanding our innovative product and service offering while delivering the best possible service to our valued customers worldwide. To help drive our next phase of growth, we’re thrilled to warmly welcome Helge Bastian to our executive team. Helge brings to iXCells a wealth of entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial leadership experience across the life sciences and healthcare space in building businesses for small and large companies with a proven track record of value creation. Helge’s leadership will be pivotal for shaping the ongoing development and execution of iXCells’ growth in the years ahead.”

“I’m impressed with iXCells outstanding scientific and technology expertise and its pragmatic approach to leverage the highly enabling, Nobel Prize winning iPSC reprogramming and genome editing technologies in combination with its deep knowledge of differentiating mammalian stem cells and developing cell-based assays for generating highly predictive human disease models,” said Dr. Bastian. “I’m simply amazed by the team’s focus to provide best in class cell-based products and drug development and discovery service solutions to the market and equally excited with iXCells’ engagement and assistance to stakeholders from the rare disease community to support patients, clinics, and biopharmaceutical companies in their efforts to develop cell-based solutions and therapies to improve patient’s conditions and even save a patient’s life. I’m grateful for the opportunity to join iXCells at this important stage in the company’s development and looking forward to working with iXCells’ highly talented team to grow and establish the company as a customer and patient-centric leading provider of disease-relevant human cell models and trusted partner for our customers to accelerate the discovery & development of novel and more effective medicines and therapies.”

Dr. Bastian joins iXCells with a plethora of experiences from the life science and healthcare sector where he contributed to building, growing and revitalizing product, custom-product, and services businesses with a variety of portfolios of innovative and highly enabling technologies or new business models in RUO and regulated markets. Dr. Bastian served as a member of several executive leadership teams and held senior leadership positions with global responsibilities in Germany, Switzerland and USA, such as Thermo Fisher Scientific (VP & General Manager of Sample Preparation and Synthetic Biology businesses), Sigma-Aldrich (VP Global Marketing, Business Development and Strategy for Sigma’s innovative Research Biotech division), SGS (Executive VP/divisional CEO Life Science Services) and QIAGEN (VP, Molecular Diagnostics, VP Global Strategic Marketing, and VP PreAnalytiX, a QIAGEN / Becton Dickinson joint venture). In addition, Dr. Bastian led oncology focused Indivumed and M2GEN (now Aster Insights) as Managing Director & Chief Commercial Officer and CEO, respectively.

Dr. Bastian serves as a Board Member to enzymatic DNA-synthesis pioneer Molecular Assemblies (San Diego) and Strategic Advisor to functional personalized oncology and drug profiling company PreComb Therapeutics (Switzerland).

Dr. Bastian studied at the universities in Kiel, Goettingen and Munich, Germany, earned his diploma in biology/biochemistry from Georg-August University, Goettingen, and holds a Ph.D. in molecular & cell biology performed at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany. Dr. Bastian is an alumnus from the Max-Planck-Network and the Columbia Business School.

Dr. Lynn Zhang will continue to serve on iXCells’ board of directors and assist with transitioning CEO leadership responsibilities in the coming months.

About iXCells Biotechnologies

Founded in 2014 and based in San Diego, CA, iXCells Biotechnologies is an innovative cell biology and cell technology company that provides preclinical drug discovery solutions with the focus on disease relevant cellular models enabling technologies and services to the academic, biotech and pharma communities to accelerate the pace of drug discovery. iXCells offers customers access to high quality primary and iPSC derived cells, custom iPSC services, functional bioassay development and drug screening. To learn more about this innovative leader within the preclinical iPSC sector, visit www.ixcellsbiotech.com.

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