23 April 2019 - - US-based clinical-stage immunotherapy company Alpine Immune Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: ALPN) has appointed Stanford Peng, M.D. Ph.D as president and head of research and development of Alpine, the company said.

Peng, who served as Alpine's executive vice president of research and development and chief medical officer since 2016, succeeds Mark Litton, Ph.D., whose role as president and chief operating officer ended effective April 16, 2019.

Peng is an industry veteran with basic, clinical, and biomedical research and development experience across large pharma, startups, biotech, academia, and clinical practice.

Prior to joining Alpine, he was Chief Medical officer at StemCentrx, where he provided strategic oversight of the company's clinical and translational programs prior to its acquisition by AbbVie.

Earlier, he served as Executive Medical director and Head of Inflammation and Translational Medicine at Seattle Genetics, Head of the Rheumatology Clinical Research Unit and Clinical Associate Member at the Benaroya Research Institute in Seattle, and held various senior positions at ARYx Therapeutics and Roche.

Peng has also held clinical positions as a member physician at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle and as an assistant professor in the Division of Rheumatology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

Alpine Immune Sciences is focused on bringing a new wave of functional immune therapeutics. It has two lead programmes.

The first, ALPN-101 for autoimmune/inflammatory diseases, is a dual ICOS/CD28 antagonist, engineered to reduce pathogenic immune responses.

The second, ALPN-202 for cancer, is a dual PD-L1/CTLA-4 antagonist and PD-L1-dependent CD28 costimulator intended to combine checkpoint inhibition with T cell costimulation an approach currently absent from approved checkpoint therapies.