News Coverage - 2007

Calvert Donates Portable Coffee Kiosks to Help Church Reach Constituents
Calvert Coffee Systems helps new church in suburban Atlanta reach constituents with the donation of a complete coffee system including portable kiosks, espresso machine, commercial coffee machine, refrigerated display case, and training.

Cary, North Carolina (December 20, 2007). In a display of philanthropic generosity, Calvert Holdings, Inc. announced today the donation a complete portable coffee kiosk through one of its companies, Calvert Coffee Systems, to a newly formed United Methodist Church in suburban Atlanta: Sacred Tapestry.

Calvert Coffee System, a turnkey package with everything needed for a coffee shop amenity, is a one-stop solution that includes

• portable coffee kiosks (or traditional millwork cabinetry),
• equipment (espresso machine, commercial coffee brewer, display case),
• training,
• intellectual property, and
• assistance with vendor selection.

The Calvert system is the complete package to create a first-class, professional coffee kiosk for any environment.

Jeff Tippett, spokesperson for Calvert Holdings, Inc. who negotiated the gift said that the donation was in complete harmony with heart and nature of Calvert Holdings. "Calvert Holdings, Inc. seeks to give back to the community in a meaningful manner." He continued by adding, "This gift has a life of its own. Sacred Tapestry can use this catalytic tool as a means to accomplish its overall mission." Noting the ongoing potential of the gift Tippett remarked, "We hope this gift will be a revenue stream and a means of attracting new parishioners."

Tippett became aware of Sacred Tapestry's need by connecting in a social media platform. One of Calvert Holdings, Inc. businesses, Calvert Creative, has a major focus helping companies develop online visibility and helping businesses communicate with customers and other businesses through online media. Tippett noted: "Through our work in social media we became aware of Sacred Tapestry's need. Responding to that need came without hesitation."

In response to the gift the pastor of Sacred Tapestry, The Reverend Teresa Angle-Young, stated: "We were overwhelmed with Calvert's generosity. Not only did they donate the kiosk and everything we needed to get up and running, but they provided training and ongoing support as we developed our approach, and continue to share insights for the development of our cafe. It is clear to me that this is not just a charitable gesture; rather it is a commitment on Calvert's part to engage in the community in a meaningful way." She continued by adding: "Calvert has made it possible for us to offer hospitality in an atmosphere of excellence that we hope will show our congregants how much we value them. The church is no longer just a place to come on Sunday for worship. It's a comfortable neighborhood center that can be a place of connection and refuge in an otherwise hectic and sterile world. The atmosphere we're creating, with Calvert's help, is conducive to a more holistic approach to ministry than we could otherwise accomplish."

The coffee kiosks will be branded by Sacred Tapestry under the name "Divine Bean Café" and plans are to eventually operate the coffee shop 7 days a week during the church's program schedule for events such as book clubs, cycling and hiking clubs, and study series. Tippett also noted that "a growing number of houses of worship are now tapping into the expanding market of coffee as a means of attracting people that are part of the Starbucks generation." The church's target market is well-acquainted with stopping by Starbucks for their daily java fix, and now they'll be able to do that while at their chosen house of worship.

Contact:

Jeff Tippett
Marketing & Business Development
Calvert Holdings, Inc.
(919) 854.4453
email: jeff.tippett @ calvertholdings.com

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Calvert Holdings, Inc. Announces Promotion of Dr. Charles B. Spainhour

Cary, North Carolina (November 1, 2007).  Calvert Holdings announces the appointment of Charles B. (Bart) Spainhour, V.M.D., Ph.D., DABFS, DABT, DABFM to the position of Senior Vice President of the parent company effective November 1. In addition to his duties as Chief Scientific Officer, Dr. Spainhour will be responsible for management of all programs and projects related to the scientific operations within the Calvert Holdings companies.

“Bart has been a key factor in the growth of our Calvert Laboratories operation. Together with the Lab’s management team, Bart has put in place a very competent technical operation that enjoys a stellar reputation within our industry. As we continue to expand our reach into licensing new technologies for our own account via Calvert Research Institute or funding technologies through Calvert BioCapital, we feel a consistent approach to managing science programs and projects across all aspects of our business is key to our operating success. Bart brings his management and technical strengths to this challenge”, stated Russ McLauchlan, Chairman and CEO.

Contact:

Allan Reiss
President & Chief Operating Officer
Calvert Holdings, Inc.
(919) 854.4453
email: allan.reiss @ calvertlabs.com

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Calvert Holdings Launches Media Group
Interactive digital media business casts off ties and heads for open water

Cary, North Carolina (July 19, 2007). Calvert Holdings, Inc. is pleased to announce the launch of Calvert Creative, a new media group that brings leading edge, state-of-the-art technology to traditional media for businesses. This group was formed and brought in-house at Calvert Holdings one year ago for the purpose of unifying and amplifying the new and existing Calvert brands. After one year of success not only within the Calvert house but also with several partner companies, this creative media group will be seeking and accepting contracts for a variety of local and national businesses.

Calvert Creative specializes in interactive digital media. From promotional CDs and web-delivered video to logo and tagline animations, Calvert Creative helps businesses create environments, experiences, and messages that connect with people's emotions, and provoke desired reactions. The creative group also draws on the extensive business development network and experience of Calvert Holdings, which has built and accelerated businesses around the globe.

For more information, please visit our website at www.calvertcreative.com.

Contact:

Lisa Creech Bledsoe
Creative Director, Calvert Creative
(919) 854.4453 x 109
email: lisa @ calvertcreative.com

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100 East Lancaster Avenue Wynnewood, PA 19096 Contact: Frieda Schmidt, 610-645-3311

WYNNEWOOD, Pa. - March 20, 2007: Two endocrinologists at Lankenau Hospital in collaboration with the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR) are conducting groundbreaking research they hope will produce a new treatment for diabetes, a disease that affects 20.8 million adults and children in the United States.

Pictured Left to Right: Dr. Lisa Laury-Kleintop, Dr. Rita El-Hajj, Loraine Upham, President & CEO, Dr. Claresa Levetan

Claresa Levetan, MD, and Rita El-Hajj, MD, are working with Lisa Laury-Kleintop, Ph.D., of LIMR, who is collaborating on the research. The physicians believe their approach, which combines advances in the study of proteins and cell biology, has the potential to reverse diabetes by establishing new insulin-producing islets in the pancreas, the organ that makes the hormone.

“An individual who has diabetes does not produce or properly use insulin, which is necessary for the body to convert sugar, starches, and other food into energy,” says Dr. Levetan. “Our research indicates that it may be possible to repopulate the pancreas with cells that can produce insulin.”

Dr. Levetan and Dr. El-Hajj are the founding physicians of CureDM, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company they established to develop new therapies that may prevent, ameliorate, or reverse diabetes.

“Diabetes is a serious threat to the health of Americans, putting them at risk for complications including cardiovascular, kidney, eye diseases, and nerve damage,” said Dr. El-Hajj. “We are optimistic that our research can one day help stem the surge in diabetes cases.”

According to Drs. Levetan and El-Hajj, CureDM has discovered a novel human peptide (Human proIslet Peptide or HIP) that stimulates precursor cells in the pancreas to become insulin-producing islets.

“We think we can achieve pancreatic function by treating diabetics with this peptide,” said Dr. Levetan. “If we’re successful, diabetes will no longer be a chronic disease; it will be a transient metabolic disorder.”

Until the last decade, scientists thought people were born with a fixed number of insulin-producing islets. “We now know that these precursor cells exist even in patients with diabetes, and that means we can apply our approach to treating both type 1 and type 2 diabetes,” said Dr. Levetan.

As new islets are formed, the researchers believe, the secretion of insulin returns, and other hormones that are deficient among diabetes patients, such as amylin, are also restored, as is the physiological control for these hormones.

Type 1 diabetes, an auto-immune disease, is usually diagnosed in children and young adults, and was previously known as juvenile diabetes. Type 2 diabetes, the most common form, is also a result of premature death of insulin producing cells, but for reasons other than auto-immunity. In both types of diabetes, the body does not produce enough insulin.

One of the advantages of the approach that Drs. Levetan and El-Hajj are taking is that it requires no embryonic stem cell research. And unlike islet transplants, only auto-immune suppression is involved and only for the type 1 diabetes patients.

In addition to its partnership with the Lankenau Institute, CureDM is affiliated with Calvert Laboratories, a research laboratory in Scranton, Pa., which is conducting preclinical testing of the peptide to provide data required to meet the standards set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Safety for human clinical trials.

Loraine V. Upham, chief executive officer of CureDM, says the company recently achieved two milestones:

• The completion of studies that defined structural improvements to stabilize the peptide for human therapeutic use.
• A study with mice that showed the peptide reversed diabetes in a treatment group as compared with the placebo group. One treatment group was able to stop using insulin by the 21st day of treatment with HIP.

“Demonstrating efficacy in mice is tremendously exciting,” says Ms. Upham. “Ultimately, we believe that HIP will be shown to be capable of restoring normal glucose metabolism in humans.”

Among CureDM’s next steps is to design a human clinical trial. The pre-clinical process is well-underway with Calvert Laboratories, and CureDM expects to submit an application for a Investigational New Drug (IND) approval to the FDA later this year.

The partnership with LIMR "opens up exceptional opportunities for CureDM," adds Ms. Upham. "Being on the Lankenau campus gives us access to leading researchers, which we hope will allow us to accelerate the development of novel therapeutic compounds for diabetes and establish new strategies for treating metabolic diseases."

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Photo Caption:
Groundbreaking research to find a new treatment for diabetes is being conducted through a collaborative effort at Lankenau Hospital and the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR). Lankenau Hospital endocrinologists Dr. Claresa Levetan and Dr. Rita El-Hajj are the founding physicians of CureDM, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company they established to develop new therapies that may prevent, ameliorate, or reverse diabetes. They are working on the research with Dr. Lisa Laury-Kleintop of LIMR. In photo from left: Dr. Laury-Kleintop, Dr. El-Hajj, CureDM CEO Lorraine V. Upham, and Dr. Levetan.

Editor’s Note: Of 20.8 million people who have diabetes, nearly one-third do not even know it, according to the American Diabetes Association. The total annual economic cost of diabetes in 2002 was estimated to be $132 billion, or one out of every 10 health care dollars spent in the United States.

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Calvert Research Institute Welcomes Kathy Meserve

Cary, NC - January 2007: In January, Kathy Meserve was appointed as Director, Portfolio Development for the Calvert Research Institute. Mrs. Meserve comes with sixteen years of experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry including ten years in the laboratory environment, and the remaining years in project management, portfolio management and business development. In her years at Genentech, GSK and start-up companies, she has worked with projects in a variety of therapeutic areas across several stages of drug development. In her new role at Calvert, Mrs. Meserve will be responsible for identifying and evaluating new potential partners, evaluating the business value of the portfolio of partnered and in-licensed compounds, and managing ongoing projects via the consortium of Calvert’s business partners.

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2006 Calvert Holdings Chairman's Award Winner Announced

Olyphant, PA - January 2007: Darlene Gilpin is the esteemed recipient of the 2006 Calvert Chairman’s Award.  A member of the Calvert Laboratories team for approximately eleven years, Darlene began as a Toxicology Technician in September 1996 before moving into the Report Drafting Unit in the summer of 1998.  After expressing an interest in the regulatory side of our business, Darlene became a Quality Assurance Auditor in early 1999.  Over the succeeding three years, she demonstrated significant interest and abilities in Quality Assurance, which eventually led to her promotion to Senior Quality Assurance Auditor in late 2002.  As Darlene’s level of experience increased, so did her knowledge and understanding of the GLP area; and as her sustained high level of performance became more obvious, Darlene was promoted to Quality Assurance Manager in late 2004.

In January 2006, she was recognized for her overall competence, many contributions, and outstanding level of performance with a promotion to Director of Quality Assurance.  In that capacity, and in addition to the activities of the Quality Assurance Unit, Darlene has the responsibility for all validation and the operation of the archiving services.

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CureDM:
A Novel Approach to Diabetes
New Jersey TechNews, December 2006/January 2007 Edition

CureDM is crossing disciplines to bring a novel approach to the treatment of diabetes. Applying new proteomics methods to physiology of diabetes to integrate clinical medicine with the frontiers of life science research has created this bold new approach.

It was a similar combination of clinical medicine and biology that yielded the discovery of insulin in 1922, when Fredrick Banting, a clinician, joined forces with a young biologist named Charles Best. This discovery transformed the disease of diabetes from a fatal condition to a chronic disease with which one could live.

Many new scientific discoveries have been made in the past decade, both in terms of pancreatic function and its relation to the brain and gut, and in terms of our knowledge of the immune attack on the pancreas at the cellular and proteomic level. Not unlike the parable of the blind men describing an elephant – many research teams have different descriptions of the cause and cure for diabetes depending on where they are standing. CureDM CEO Loraine Upham believes that it is the ultimate integration of these scientific endeavors that will produce a truly innovative new treatment.

Dr. Claresa Levetan and Dr. Rita El-hajj, endocrinologists at Main Line Endocrinology in Lankenau Hospital, forge ahead using their clinical skills and the tools available to treat patients with diabetes. However, they believe that advances in proteomics and cell biology hold promise that diabetes can be reversed by islet neogenesis, a process by which new insulin producing islets can be established to repopulate the pancreas. Recent research indicates that the precursor cells that are stimulated to form new insulin-producing cells exist, even in patients with longstanding diabetes, creating potential for this type of treatment in both type 1 and 2 diabetes.

CureDM scientists have discovered a bioactive peptide candidate called “Human proIslet Peptide (HIP)” that seems to have the ability to stimulate islet neogenesis from progenitor cells that exist throughout the pancreas. Scientists once thought that the number of insulin-producing islets a person was born with is all they would ever have. “We now know that islets turnover, at a naturally slow rate, that may be increased by treatment with an islet neogenesis agent, such as CureDM’s HIP Peptide,” Upham said.

In addition to developing the innovative human peptide, CureDM also is applying clinical principles to define the most appropriate conditions and dosing strategies to promote the process of islet neogenesis to reverse the disease state. Without the clinical understanding to make the subtle process of islet neogenesis turn on in a patient with long standing diabetes, efficacy may be difficult to achieve at best. Having two endocrinologists as founders is a crucial aspect of CureDM’s novel scientific and clinical approach.

It remains to be seen if the peptide meets safety standards required to be administered to humans, and if the dosing regimen can be implemented effectively to show efficacy in human subjects. Toward that next milestone, CureDM is charging through preclinical testing with Calvert Laboratories, a renowned contract research laboratory in Scranton, Pa., whose expert team is utilized to show whether HIP can meet the strict FDA standards in the U.S. to achieve approval for trials in humans.

CureDM biologists and clinicians have teamed up in a way that brings breadth of understanding to bear with laser-like focus on the problem of diabetes, toward a new therapeutic alternative to insulin injections. It is this type of innovation that is required to change diabetes again, from a chronic condition to a transient metabolic disorder.

Reprinted with permission

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