Dit werd afgelopen zomer nog gepubliceerd over Nkarta, een andere CAR-NK vakgenoot met nagenoeg identieke financiële reserves als Affimed:
Nkarta, Inc. (NKTX)
Last up on this list is Nkarta, another clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company. Like many biopharmas at the start of the clinical process, Nkarta is pre-revenue and runs at a loss – but its interesting approach to cancer treatment should spark investor attention. Nkarta is working on the development of off-the-shelf, allogenic engineered natural killer (NK) cell therapies. This approach aims to create a cell therapy that is both more potent and better tolerated than current tech allows and will have broad applications to multiple hematologic and solid tumor cancers.
Nkarta currently has two programs in clinical trials, and two more in pre-clinical discovery. The first clinical-stage drug candidate is NKX101, which was engineered to treat NKG2D ligands whose targets are selectively overexpressed in cancer cells. The drug candidate is currently undergoing a Phase 1 clinical trial which is demonstrating an encouraging safety profile. Preliminary data from the study, albeit limited in number of patients, has also shown potential efficacy against hematologic cancers.
The second clinical-stage drug candidate, NKX019, has also had a positive preliminary data readout from the Phase 1 clinical trial. This trial is targeting a specific B-cell antigen, CD19, and is administered as a multi-dose, multi-cycle monotherapy for patients suffering from r/r B-cell cancers. NKX019 has shown that it is well-tolerated by patients.
Both of these drug candidates are in continuing trials, and additional clinical data from the ongoing dose escalation studies are expected in 2H22.
NKarta, like Kinnate above, has a solid cash reserve on hand, totaling $219.1 million in liquid assets. This can be set against expenses for research and development and general administration totaling $26.1 million for 1Q22, and suggests that, as of March 31, the company had resources sufficient for 8 quarters of operations.
SVB analyst Daina Graybosch opened her coverage of this stock last month with upbeat commentary, saying, “[We] believe Nkarta is well positioned to compete given the company's deep biologic expertise of NK cells, as evinced by extensive publication on programs and fundamental biology… The company breaks ground on commercialscale GMP manufacturing this summer, which we believe may be attractive to acquirers. Further, the company's collaboration and licensing of CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology with CRISPR Therapeutics enables Nkarta to better and more quickly develop highly engineered, competitive NK cell products, while we also see compelling rationale for combining CAR-NK and CAR-T…”
Along with her comments, Graybosch gave NKTX an Outperform (or Buy) rating, and her $30 price target suggests the stock has a one-year gain of 101% ahead of it.
Dit fonds daalt vandaag (evenals gisteren) 9% na een adviesverlaging door een andere analist. Toch is dit fonds nog steeds substantieel hoger gewaardeerd dan AFMD ($260 mio om $175 mio) ondanks dat alles nog in fase 1 zit en er geen lange termijn info is tav complete remissions. Ik vind alleen hun AML franchise interessant.