Medicenna Provides Update on its Presentations at the 2024 ASCO Annual Meeting

ASCO has informed the Company that the previously accepted MDNA11 oral abstract has been withdrawn due to alleged violation of their prior publication policy based solely on their review of the abstract presented at AACR 2024.

Medicenna disagrees with ASCO’s decision as the AACR 2024 abstract was limited to on-going interim results whereas the ASCO 2024 abstract specified data from a completed phase 1 study that were not presented at AACR 2024.

No other matters were raised by ASCO regarding any data included in the submitted abstract, the planned data intended for presentation at ASCO, or any aspect of the clinical trial.

The Company looks forward to sharing the full high-impact data set of our potentially best-in-class IL-2 and emerging results from the ABILITY-1 trial of MDNA11 at a special virtual event to be organized over the next 2 to 4 weeks. Details on the event will follow.

TORONTO and HOUSTON, May 13, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Medicenna Therapeutics Corp. (“Medicenna” or the “Company”) (TSX: MDNA, OTCQB: MDNAF), a clinical-stage immunotherapy company focused on the development of Superkines, announced today that the American Society of Clinical Oncology ("ASCO") decided to reverse its decision and to withdraw Medicenna’s abstract entitled “Results from ABILITY-1 Monotherapy Dose Escalation Study with MDNA11, an Engineered Long-acting IL-2 agonist, in patients with advanced solid tumors,” which had been initially selected for an oral podium presentation at ASCO’s 2024 Annual Meeting. ASCO advised the Company that the reason for this withdrawal was that the Program Committee had determined that the Company had allegedly violated ASCO’s “Prior Publication Policy” by previously reporting results at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research (“AACR”). No other concerns were raised by the ASCO Program Committee.

The Company disagrees with the ASCO Program Committee’s decision to withdraw the oral podium presentation. In the Company’s opinion, it did not violate ASCO’s Prior Publication Policy. While the Company did present results at the AACR, the AACR abstract explicitly referenced a data cut-off date of December 23, 2023, and only on-going interim monotherapy results were presented, whereas the ASCO abstract specified that the results presented would focus on a complete Phase 1 monotherapy data set without a data cut-off date. This complete data set was analyzed and prepared specifically for presentation at ASCO 2024.