Benzinga | Oct 7, 2021 04:01PM EDT

Nkarta Announces Updates To NKX019 and NKX101 Clinical Development Programs

Nkarta, Inc. (NASDAQ:NKTX), a biopharmaceutical company developing engineered natural killer (NK) cell therapies to treat cancer, today announced NKX019 and NKX101 clinical development program updates.

Patients have been dosed in the international Phase 1 clinical trial of NKX019 in advanced B-cell malignancies. NKX019 is an NK cell immunotherapy that is engineered to eradicate tumors expressing CD19, a validated B-cell cancer target.

"We are excited to explore the potential of NKX019, our second clinical-stage, engineered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) NK cell therapy candidate, to become a leading treatment of B-cell malignances for eventual use in a broadly accessible outpatient setting," said Paul J. Hastings, President and Chief Executive Officer of Nkarta. "NKX019 builds upon the potent innate anti-tumor biology and promising safety profile of natural killer cells. This trial moves us one step closer to bringing game-changing, off-the-shelf cell therapies to cancer patients. We anticipate reporting initial data from the NKX019 study in 2022."

Nkarta is producing the clinical supply of NKX019 at its in-house cGMP clinical manufacturing facility in South San Francisco, California.

Nkarta is also updating guidance on when it expects to announce initial data from the first-in-human Phase 1 clinical trial of NKX101, an engineered CAR NK cell therapy candidate targeting the NKG2D ligand, in patients with relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML) or higher-risk myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) to the first half of 2022.

Multiple factors have affected the cadence of the NKX101 Phase 1 study, including the use of haplomatched donor derived cells in the original study design, requirement for a staggered enrollment of patients that was longer than originally expected, and COVID-19 related disruptions. As previously announced, the clinical trial protocol was later amended in consultation with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to be able to dose patients with either off-the-shelf or haplomatched cells, shorten the stagger between certain patients, and introduce a second parallel dosing regimen. The new timing is intended to allow Nkarta to report a robust data set from the study, which is currently enrolling patients at several locations in the United States.