NantKwest Announces Presentations at the Upcoming 16th Annual Meeting of the Society for Natural Immunity

NantKwest, Inc (Nasdaq:NK), a pioneering, next generation, clinical-stage immunotherapy company focused on harnessing the unique power of the immune system using natural killer (NK) cells to treat cancer, infectious diseases and inflammatory diseases, today announced that the company has been selected to present at NK2016, the 16th Annual Meeting of the Society for Natural Immunity in Taormina, Italy on October 2nd – 5th, 2016.

The Society of Natural Immunity was established as an educational not for profit organization in 1989 for the purpose of providing a framework for supporting an established tradition of meetings and symposia on all aspects of Natural Killer cells. “We have been a participant in the Annual Meeting of the Society for Natural Immunity for many years. Continuing our focus on harnesses the innate immune system through natural killer cell based therapy, we are honored to be selected as a presenter at the upcoming NK2016 conference,” said Dr. Hans Klingemann, Vice President of Research and Development at NantKwest.

NantKwest’s presentations at NK2016 include the following:

Optimizing Allogeneic Natural Killer Cell Reactivity by Gene Knock-Out/Knock-Down of Inhibitory Receptor. Presenter, Dr. Francisco Navarro, NantKwest’s Senior Scientist.

Creating NK Cell Therapeutics with Multiple Targeting Activities: Electroporation of MRNA for Chimeric Antigen Receptors (CARs) Into Human NK Effector Cell Lines. Presenter, Dr. Junaid Khan, NantKwest’s Senior Scientist.

Intra-Tumor Injection of CAR Engineered NK Cells Induces Tumor Regression and Protection Against Tumor Re-Challenge. Presenter, Dr. Laurent Boissel, NantKwest’s Associate Director of R&D.

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 http://www.nantkwest.com.

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NantKwest, IncJen Hodson, [e-mail]