Benzinga | Jul 14, 2021 09:07AM EDT

Nkarta Unveils Plans For New San Francisco HQ, Manufacturing Site

* Nkarta Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ:NKTX) will be moving into an 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 Company did not disclose the cost of the project.

* 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 should produce a commercial supply of multiple cell therapy products.

* The biotech is currently in phase 1 testing for its leading treatment, NKX101, which uses NK cells from healthy donors engineered to express a chimeric antigen receptor targeting NKG2D ligand in certain blood cancers.

* The new headquarters will be in addition to a smaller 2,700-square-foot facility, also in the San Francisco area, that Nkarta just finished constructing.

* 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.

* The Company expects phase 1 studies to kick off in the second half of the year.

* In May, Nkarta collaborated with CRISPR Therapeutics to co-develop and commercialize two CAR-NK therapies targeting CD70 primarily for oncology indications.

* Price Action: NKTX shares closed at $28.28 on Tuesday.