Artiva Biotherapeutics, Inc. Common Stock Stifel 2026 Virtual Immunology and Inflammation Forum

Fred, over to you. Thanks, Alex, and thanks again for having us.

I'm Fred. I'm CEO of Artiva. I've been CEO of Artiva for a little over five years. We are a phase III company developing a therapy for refractory RA. We are one of the companies that is pursuing the very exciting mechanism of deep B-cell depletion, as first demonstrated by autologous CAR T, and we're doing it using NK cells. The advantages of NK cells is that we have demonstrated that it can drive a very deep B-cell depletion, and there are two specific advantages. Number one, we don't have the side effects that are typically seen with T cells, such as the CRS and the ICANS. Number two, because of our differentiated safety profile, we can treat our patients in a community setting.

Everybody understands that for any of these deep B-cell depleting products, the holy grail is to be able to do it in a community setting where the vast majority of the patients are located. I can tell you that to date, we've dosed over 100 autoimmune patients, and the vast majority of them we did in a community rheumatology practice. We chose to work in RA because not a lot of people had been working in RA, and we wanted to go after an indication where we could be differentiated. It's a large indication. It's one where having a tolerability profile that's differentiated is important, and I'm sure we'll be talking a lot more about that as we speak.

Yeah, definitely. The goal of the therapy is to eliminate all the B cells. This is what we've learned through autologous CAR T. That is the goal of the treatment. We use non-genetically modified NK cells because NK cells turn out to be equally strong effector cells as T cells. Because we don't engineer our NK cells, so we don't engineer a CAR, we actually use monoclonal antibodies to do the targeting. Rituximab does the targeting towards CD20. Then the Fc portion of rituximab will activate our NK cells via the CD16 receptor. That activates the NK cell, which kills the B cell. This is an entirely different approach to actually killing B cells, but it's pretty much using the same CD19, CD20 targeting.

The big advantage of NK cells is the fact that they don't expand the way the T cells have to expand in order for them to do their activity. It's that T cell expansion that leads to CRS, ICANS, and some of the recent autologous CAR T side effects that we've been hearing about from Novartis and from Bristol Myers Squibb. On the one hand, the doses of NK cells that one has to give is a couple of orders of magnitude higher than the T cells. You have to have a very scalable manufacturing process in order to do that. If you can do that and you can already give them at high doses, then the advantage is you're not relying on them to expand, and so that avoids a lot of those side effects.

Those side effects become really important because as one is thinking about bringing these sorts of therapies into the community, whether you're thinking of taking autologous CAR Ts, TCEs, in vivo CAR T, or even our therapy, one ideally has a tolerability profile which allows a physician to actually treat their patients and send them home so that they fit into the existing monitoring profile that those have. As we'll talk about our safety data, thankfully our therapy does seem to have a very strong tolerability profile.

No, we're using the exact same dose of rituximab that's in the label for RA.

Okay. We use the same dose of rituximab that was in the label for NHL when we treated NHL patients with our therapy, and we achieved high complete response rates and really nice durability there.

In autoimmune disease, we're using rituximab as rheumatologists use rituximab, which is basically 2 doses of a gram each 14 days apart. On those same days is when we give our AlloNK, which is just another 5 to 10 minute IV infusion.

Yeah, I think that the data that has been generated in oncology is very telling because you see our hypothesis in autoimmune disease is you have to get rid of every B-cell and then hopefully you see a benefit in immune disease.