Soon-Shiong offers insights on research and development efforts, clinical update during presentation in New York.
NEW YORK CITY, June 7 —Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, chairman and CEO of NantHealth (Nasdaq:NH) and NantKwest (Nasdaq: NK), laid out his vision for the next-generation of cancer research immuno-oncology 2.0 at the Jefferies 2018 Global Healthcare Conference in New York City.
Dr. Soon-Shiong’s presentation focused on the research and development efforts and a clinical update for NantHealth, a leading next-generation, evidence-based, personalized healthcare company, and NantKwest, a leading, clinical-stage natural killer cell based therapeutics company. Dr. Soon-Shiong also discussed an investigational hypothesis that cancer treatment can move beyond checkpoint inhibitors by focusing on orchestrating the body’s immune system at the molecular level to fight patients’ cancer.
A link to audio and slides of Dr. Soon-Shiong’s presentation, which was delivered live at 9 a.m. EST on Wednesday, June 6 in New York is available here.
About NantHealth, Inc.
NantHealth, Inc., a member of the NantWorks ecosystem of companies, is a next-generation, evidence-based, personalized healthcare company enabling improved patient outcomes and more effective treatment decisions for critical illnesses. NantHealth’s unique systems-based approach to personalized healthcare applies novel diagnostics tailored to the specific molecular profiles of patient tissue and integrates this molecular data in a clinical setting with large-scale, real-time biometric signal and phenotypic data to track patient outcomes and deliver precision medicine. For nearly a decade, NantHealth has developed an adaptive learning system that integrates our unique molecular profiling solution, software and hardware. Our system infrastructure collects, indexes, analyzes and interprets billions of molecular, clinical, operational and financial data points derived from novel and traditional sources to continuously improve decision-making and optimize our clinical pathways and decision algorithms over time. For more information please visit www.nanthealth.com.
About NantKwest Inc.
NantKwest (Nasdaq:NK) is a pioneering, next generation, clinical-stage immunotherapy company focused on harnessing the unique power of our immune system using natural killer (NK) cells to treat cancer, infectious diseases and inflammatory diseases. NK cells are the body’s first line of defense due to the innate ability of NK cells to rapidly identify and destroy cells under stress, such as cancer or virally-infected cells.
NantKwest’s unique NK cell-based platform, with the capacity to grow active killer cells as a biological cancer therapy, has been designed to induce cell death against cancer or infected cells by three different modes of action: (1) Direct killing using activated NK cells (aNK) that release toxic granules directly into the cell through cell to cell contact, (2) Antibody-mediated killing using haNKs, which are NK cells engineered to incorporate a high affinity receptor that binds to an administered antibody, enhancing the cancer cell killing effect of that antibody, and (3) Targeted activated killing using taNKs, which are NK cells engineered to incorporate chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) to target tumor-specific antigens found on the surface of cancer cells.
Our aNK, haNK and taNK platform addresses certain limitations of T cell therapies including the reduction of risk of serious “cytokine storms” reported after T cell therapy. As an “off-the-shelf” therapy, NantKwest’s NK cells do not rely on a patient’s own often compromised immune system. In Phase 1 clinical trials in patients with late stage cancer, NantKwest’s NK cells have been successfully administered as an outpatient infusion therapy without any reported severe side effects, even at doses of 10 billion cells.
By leveraging an integrated and extensive genomics and transcriptomics discovery and development engine, together with a pipeline of multiple, clinical-stage, immuno-oncology programs that include a Phase 2 trial for a rare form of melanoma and the planned initiation of a clinical trial of NK cells targeted to breast cancer, we believe NantKwest is uniquely positioned to be the premier immunotherapy company and transform medicine by delivering living drugs in a bag and bringing novel NK cell-based therapies to routine clinical care. For more information please visit www.nantkwest.com and follow Dr. Soon-Shiong on Twitter@Dr.PatSoonShiong.