Nkarta retains pure killer remedy ball rolling with plans for brand new San Francisco headquarters, manufacturing web site
Nkarta Therapeutics is not slowing down. The biotech made an impressive IPO debut last July and administered its leading commercial cancer immunotherapy to the first patient a few months later.
Now, the South San Francisco-based biotech company is moving into an 88,000 square foot facility that will not only serve as its newest headquarters, but also support the research, development and future commercial manufacture of its cell therapy pipeline.
Nkarta plans to redesign the center to optimize the mix of its off-the-shelf cancer therapies with natural killers (NK), the company said on Wednesday. The biotech did not disclose the cost of the project.
The facility will be a “multi-product” manufacturing facility and is slated to go online by the end of 2023, Nkarta said. At full capacity, the facility should be able to produce “commercial shipments of multiple cell therapy products”.
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The biotech is currently in Phase 1 testing of its lead drug NKX101, which uses NK cells from healthy donors engineered to express a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) that targets the NKG2D ligand in certain blood cancers aims.
Nkarta says its manufacturing process is capable of producing “an abundant amount of NK cells,” which are more cost effective than current allogeneic and autologous cell therapies when made on a large scale. To get there, Nkarta uses a proprietary NKSTIM cell line capable of producing hundreds of single doses from a single manufacturing run.
The cell line can freeze and store the CAR NK cells and is designed to “allow immediate, ready-to-use administration to patients at the point of care,” said Nkarta.
The new headquarters will be in addition to a smaller 2,700 square foot facility, also in the San Francisco area, which Nkarta has just completed. Nkarta designed this site to suit the needs of its research activities and early studies.
At its smaller facility, the company is currently producing supplies of another treatment called NKX019, an investigational NK cell therapy designed to fight tumors expressing CD19 antigen for the treatment of B-cell malignant diseases. The company expects to start phase 1 studies in the second half of the year.
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In addition to its own assets, as part of its most recent alliance with gene editing specialist CRISPR Therapeutics, Nkarta is working hard to discover potential CRISPR / Cas9 gene-edited cell therapies for cancer.
Under the agreement, the companies will develop and sell two CAR-NK cell candidates, one targeting the CD70 tumor antigen and the “other target to be targeted,” according to a joint statement.
With the upcoming manufacturing facility, Nkarta CEO Paul Hastings is confident that the “expanded presence will drive operational excellence and accelerate the development of transformative NK cell therapies for a wide range of cancers”.
