Avalon GloboCare Corp. provided a year-end business update. Avalon entered into a new collaboration with University of Pittsburgh Medical Center to develop new cancer immunotherapy approaches and streamline manufacturing processes to bring these powerful treatments to cancer patients with a rapid bio-manufacturing time.

Avalon's lead candidate, AVA-011, combines Avalon's FLASH-CAR technology with an innovative messenger ribonucleic acid-based technology platform, and is currently at an IND-enabling stage. Avalon is on track to initiate AVA-011 first-in-human clinical trial by mid-2022. This non-viral, next-generation chimeric antigen receptor-based cellular therapies approach is expected to streamline and enhance the quality of clinical-grade CAR T-cell manufacturing and the Company believes will result in efficacious, lower cost cellular therapy products, making them accessible to a wider range of cancer patients.

Avalon's research partnership with the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, is rapidly progressing. The co-development of a novel, cell-free, in-silico system with BOKU expands Avalon's ability to design and produce novel cell membrane proteins—including receptors found on the surface of immune cells and cancer cells that function in cell signaling and are important drug targets. This system also provides Avalon with an efficient tool to screen and optimize potential therapeutic targets.

Avalon has co-developed and jointly filed a patent with BOKU on a novel platform of S-layer coated emulsome technology for next-generation, targeted drug delivery and cellular immunotherapy applications. The Company believes this novel SLET platform will help accelerate the development of Avalon's mRNA-based Flash-CAR™ and other cellular therapy programs. Targeted delivery of mRNA into immune effector cells using SLET can potentially open the door to new generation of cancer immunotherapy and other applications including targeted drug delivery and therapeutics, vaccine development, in vitro diagnostics, and cellular medicines.