Nkarta, Inc. Common Stock H.C. Wainwright 28th Annual Global Investment Conference
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All right. Good morning, everyone.
Thank you for joining us at the H.C. Wainwright 28th Annual Global Investment Conference. My name is Emily Bodnar, and I am an equity research analyst at H.C. Wainwright. I am pleased to be here with Paul Hastings, CEO of Nkarta, and Nadir Mahmood, who is coming shortly. Maybe to start, for those who are newer to the story, and given all the recent changes in the cell therapy space, give us a bit of background about your CAR-NK allogeneic cell therapy platform and some of the ongoing programs.
Yeah. We are a fully off-the-shelf allogeneic, here he comes. This is his question, actually. I wanted to give it to him because he is really good at this. Emily wants to know about the platform. You want to give her the platform?
Yeah. Nadir is our President, by the way.
I am the CEO. Great.
Well, thanks for having us. As a quick overview, the company is an autoimmune disease company. Our lead program is NKX019. That is a CD19-directed CAR natural killer cell, NK cell. That is engineered to express a chimeric antigen receptor that recognizes CD19 antigens on pathogenic B cells, and it is also engineered to express membrane-bound IL-15 to enhance its persistence and activity in vivo. We have been studying this program now in phase I-II clinical trials in a variety of different autoimmune indications. The first one, Ntrust-1, is primarily nephrology indications, lupus nephritis, primary membranous nephropathy. Ntrust-2 is our basket trial, which is focused on systemic sclerosis, myositis, vasculitis, and we recently added rheumatoid arthritis to this as well.
Our programs have been in the clinic for a little bit, and we are excited to be presenting our first data set later this year at the American College of Rheumatology Convergence meeting in Orlando in November.
Yep. There has been a lot of interest, obviously, for cell therapy in the autoimmune disease space, and we have had several companies, both autologous and allogeneic, which have now reported data across various indications. What role does CD19 play in these diseases and why is a CAR-NK approach potentially differentiated here?
All right. Let us talk about CAR-NK first and why that is differentiated. These cells are allogeneic. They are fully off the shelf. The accessibility of these cells is the patient goes to the clinic, the physician diagnoses the patient or qualifies the patient as eligible for cell therapy, and the physician goes to the shelf, picks up the vial of NKX019, and injects it into the patient, just like you would with an antibody. The accessibility is one factor versus autologous therapies, where you have to wait 30 days to manufacture, or if you wait for more rapid manufacturing, you can run into all kinds of issues with rapid expansion. Accessibility is one. Safety is another. To date, we have seen no CRS, no ICANS.
None of the toxicities that are associated with the rapid release of cytokines, associated with the rapid expansion of T cells, occurs with NK cells because the cell has a short half-life. It goes in, it targets, whether it's in the case of autoimmune disease, autoantibodies or bad B cells, and it does its thing and it leaves. You don't have it hanging around for a long time. Therefore, the toxicity profile of the NK cell could be, in autoimmune disease, much better for the patient than the toxicity profile of CAR T. We don't have the expansion, we don't have the toxicity issues that go along with the expansion. We have accessibility, and we have the ability to manufacture these cells and give you Nadir's NK cells.
I don't have to wait to get your cells, to have you wait for those cells to be administered. Anything to add to that?
You want me to talk about CD19 as an antigen?
Yeah. That was a simple question.
Yeah. CD19 is a marker that's expressed on the surface of B cells. It is probably, over the course of the maturation and life of a B cell, the most broadly expressed across the various stages of growth. You have other markers, CD20 and BCMA as well, but CD19 is the broadest coverage. B cells are the type of cells that produce autoantibodies that drive these particular autoimmune diseases. What we've seen from some of the pioneering work out of a German academic group in Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg was the ability to target and deplete killing B cells by targeting CD19 expression. It was that data set that created this first real glimpse into potentially driving these drug-free remission and responses that have now lasted for, in some patients, multiple years.
It was that excitement that I think drove everybody into the field to really think about this concept of depleting and eliminating the bad B cells that are expressing CD19, that drives this immune reset mechanism that gives you these really prolific responses. We really believe that by engineering in an ability to recognize and kill CD19-expressing B cells, we're hitting probably the best target, or at least the one where there's the most demonstrable data showing efficacy right now.
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