What is allogeneic NK therapy?

What is allogeneic NK cell therapy. Natural killer cells are a very exciting area of development and are being developed as what we would call an allogeneic NK cell therapy or allogeneic cell therapy, I should say. That means that these cells can be produced and frozen and stored and be given to a patient pretty quickly. So what we call off the shelf products, they don't require the patient to produce it himself or herself because there simply aren't enough NK cells, often for patients who are sick with myeloma to make it an effective therapy that's unlike T cells.

So we're really looking at different NK cell products that we can develop. So what are the source of the NK cells? You can have it from a healthy adult that we call peripheral blood NK maybe you have a healthy adult, you collect their NK cells, grow them, and then you're able to give them back to another patient to kill tumor.

You also have the possibility of cord blood derived NK cells. Now this is from umbilical cord blood. Many of you have heard of cord blood banking, and it's true that the entire immune system actually could be generated from the cord blood, as we know, from cord blood transplant. And so because of that, you can actually take the NK cells and culture them really actually culture them very nicely.

And if you do culture them, you get them to be just as active as you would imagine an adult NK cell to be. So those can also be given. One thing we know now about NK cells is you can engineer them to be a car, so a chimeric antigen receptor NK cell can be produced. And one good thing about that is that it can be specific to a certain protein.

So for example, BCMA or SLAMF7, and that's being developed as well. Another source of NK cells that's really exciting is that IPS or the progenitor cells inducible pluripotent stem cells that can actually be generated from a bank. And what's interesting about that is when you generate these NK cells from the IPS bank, you end up being able to sort of shift the way that NK cells look and how they behave, try to get them to be a little bit more active and more persistent, and then you can on top of that, engineer them and maybe engineer them to be specific.

So an incr and maybe also engineer them to work really well with things like daratumumab. So NK cells are the business cells for making the daratumumab work and you can engineer them to do that better. So there's a lot of ways you can manipulate NK cells and there's a lot of sources for NK cells and I think it's going to be a really nice horizon for us to explore for cellular therapy.

As I mentioned, these are off the shelf cells because we now know that there's very little chance of graft versus host disease, which you would think about, that these cells coming from a different person or a different source might attack the patient. And in fact, that doesn't generally happen with NK cell therapy. So it's actually a nice therapy to think of as your off the shelf option.