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Nkarta Therapeutics isn’t slowing down. It made an impressive IPO debut last July and then followed that up five months later by dosing the first patient with its leading off-the-shelf cancer immunotherapy as part of phase 1 testing.
Now, the South San Francisco-based biotech says it’s moving into a 88,000-square-foot facility that will not only serve as its newest headquarters, but will support the research, development and future commercial manufacturing of its cell therapy pipeline.
The manufacturing center will be custom designed to optimize the assembly of Nkarta’s off-the-shelf natural killer (NK) investigational cancer therapies, the company said on Wednesday.
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The facility will be a “multi-product” manufacturing site and is scheduled to come online by the end of 2023, Nkarta said. At full capacity, the facility “is expected to have the flexibility to produce commercial supply of multiple cell therapy products.”
The new headquarters will be in addition to a smaller 2,700-square-foot facility that Nkarta just finished constructing, also in the San Francisco area. That site was designed to meet the needs for Nkarta’s research and early-stage trials, according to the company.
Nkarta is currently in phase 1 testing for its leading treatment, NKX101, which uses NK cells from healthy donors that are engineered to express a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) targeting NKG2D ligand in certain blood cancers.
Nkarta’s manufacturing process is able to produce “an abundant supply of NK cells” that are lower in cost than the current allogeneic and autologous cell therapies when made at scale, the company said. To get there, Nkarta uses a proprietary NKSTIM cell line that’s able to produce hundreds of individual doses from a single manufacturing run.
The cell line can freeze and store the CAR NK cells and is designed to “enable immediate, off-the-shelf administration to patients at the point of care,” Nkarta said.
At its smaller site, the company is currently producing supplies of another treatment known as NKX019, an investigational NK cell therapy engineered to target tumors expressing CD19 antigen for the treatment of B-cell malignancies. Phase 1 studies are expected to kick off in the second half of the year.
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On top of its own assets, Nkarta is also hard at work discovering potential CRISPR/Cas9 gene-edited cell therapies for cancer as part of its latest pact with gene-editing specialist CRISPR Therapeutics.
The companies will both develop and sell two CAR NK cell candidates, one targeting the CD70 tumor antigen and the “other target to be determined,” according to a joint statement.
Thanks to the forthcoming manufacturing facility, Nkarta CEO Paul Hastings said the company is confident the “expanded footprint will drive continued operational excellence and accelerate the development of transformative NK cell therapies for a broad range of cancers.”
