Award Winning Mayo Clinic Scientist Joins Cardio3 BioSciences

Cardio3 BioSciences, a leading Belgian biotechnology company specialising in regenerative therapies for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, today announces that Dr. Atta Behfar is joining its research and development laboratories as Director for Advanced Research. Dr. Atta Behfar, one of the key scientists involved in the development of C-Cure®, will spend a year at Cardio3 BioSciences on assignment from Mayo Clinic to develop and strengthen the research pipeline.

Dr. Behfar is a member of the clinician investigator program in cardiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, USA and has played a key role in the research underlying Cardio3 BioSciences’ lead product, C-Cure, a revolutionary stem cell treatment for heart failure. His work was recognised by the Herman K. Gold Young Investigator Award at the Annual American College of Cardiology meeting in March 2010, in Georgia, Atlanta highlighting the quality of the science behind Cardio3 BioSciences’ approach.

C-Cure is designed to reprogram the patient’s own stem cells into new heart cells to rebuild the heart. Dr Behfar has played an active part in developing the technology that directs the patient’s cells to become cardiopoietic cells – cells ‘programmed’ to become new heart muscle cells when injected back into the heart of a patient, replacing those cells lost during heart failure and restoring heart function.

Cardio3 BioSciences has recently announced positive three-month safety data and preliminary efficacy results from its Phase II stage clinical trial of C-Cure in heart failure. C-Cure demonstrated a very good safety profile and positive trends in physiological and clinical measures that suggest that C-Cure, as anticipated from animal model data, is acting on heart muscle in a way that could yield important clinical benefits.

Dr. Behfar will work with Cardio3 BioSciences’ scientific in-house team as of July 1st, 2010, where he will have the opportunity to work directly with the Company as it continues to further develop its unique technology.

Dr. Atta Behfar said: “It is a very exciting time for Cardio3 BioSciences with C-Cure having shown encouraging early results in a clinical setting. I look forward to working with the in-house team as they further advance the product from being a scientific concept towards becoming a therapy that could potentially treat one of the world’s greatest unmet medical needs. Many additional treatments may also be leveraged out of the science that lead to C-Cure discovery, and my role will be to fully develop the potential of Cardio3 BioSciences’ unique technology.”

Dr. Christian Homsy, CEO of Cardio3 BioSciences added: “We are delighted that Dr Behfar has chosen to come to work with Cardio3 BioSciences and believe this demonstrates not only the quality of the work carried out at Cardio3 BioSciences but also the standard of research in Belgium more generally.”