September 12, 2025 – The winners of the Lasker Awards, known as the “America’s Nobels", was officially announced on September 11. Dr. Steven McKnight, Scientific Advisor and Shareholder of TenNor Therapeutics, was awarded the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for discoveries into the role of proteins of low sequence complexity and their influence on the dynamics of cell morphology and biological regulation.

This year’s Lasker Basic Medical Research Award is given to Steven McKnight and Dirk Görlich for their pioneering work on low-complexity domains (LCDs). They showed, using a variety of elegant approaches, that such LCDs can form homotypic and heterotypic interactions that lead to reversible phase separations in cells. These phase separations, which in the laboratory manifest as hydrogels and in cells as membrane free structures (liquid condensates) such as P bodies and stress granules, form hubs for molecular processes such as transcription and messenger RNA (mRNA) splicing and also underlie the selectivity of nuclear pore complexes (NPCs), which act a barriers to large molecules unless they are escorted by specific LCD containing nuclear transporters that interact with LCD containing nucleoporins within NPC channels. Naturally occurring LCD mutations linked to neurodegeneration and other diseases cause the formation of irreversible (rather than reversible) LCD polymers, resulting in insoluble, amyloid-like, fibrils, underscoring the critical importance of these domains.

Dr. Steven McKnight is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He has co-founded several biotechnology companies, including Tularik, Cumbre, and Peloton. Dr. McKnight has served as a scientific advisor since the formation of TenNor Therapeutics. He is also one of the original shareholders of the company.

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About TenNor Therapeutics

Incorporated in 2013, TenNor Therapeutics is a near-commercial stage biotechnology company dedicated to the discovery, development and commercialization of differentiated therapies to address unmet medical needs in disease areas associated with bacterial infections and bacterial metabolism. Empowered by its proprietary multi-targeting conjugate molecule technology, TenNor Therapeutics aims to deliver the best therapeutic solutions to overcome the limitations of conventional treatments and improve patient outcomes. As of January 24, 2026, TenNor Therapeutics had built a pipeline of seven innovative programs, including two Core Products, namely, rifasutenizol (TNP-2198), a new molecular entity (“NME”) drug candidate used as part of a triple therapy in combination with amoxicillin and a proton pump inhibitor for the treatment of Helicobacter pylori (“H. pylori”) infection in China and U.S. as well as monotherapy for bacterial vaginosis and C. difficile infection in China; and rifaquizinone (TNP-2092 injection), a triple-targeting antibacterial drug candidate for the treatment of implant-associated bacterial infections, i.e. acute bacterial skin and skin structure infection (“ABSSSI”) and prosthetic joint infection (“PJI”), as well as left ventricular assist device infection (“LVADI”) and catheter-related bloodstream infection (“CRBSI”) in China and the U.S.

For more information, please visit: www.tennortherapeutics.com