Nkarta (
NKTX) stock surged Monday — partially
reversing a 31% dive on Friday — after unveiling promising test results for its non-Hodgkin lymphoma treatment.
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The company unveiled data from five patients in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Its cancer treatment, dubbed NKX019, uses donor immune cells. Scientists then teach those cells to find and destroy specific problematic cells. In this case, those are CD19 cells.
After three months, the five patients no longer had any CD19 cells in their blood. Also promisingly, this type of cancer typically arises from immune cells known as B cells. These cells normalized after three months. One patients showed normal B cells after a year.
Leerink Partners analyst Daina Graybosch says the results prove the benefit for NKX019, which the company is also testing in patients with lupus nephritis. On Friday,
Nkarta stock took a bath after the firm refocused its priorities to NKX019, deemphasizing an acute myeloid leukemia treatment that showed unpromising results.
Nkarta stock soared 17.6% to 10.49.
Nkarta Stock: Could Autoimmune Diseases Be Next?
There's early evidence that CAR-T drugs — the class to which NKX019 belongs — could work in patients with autoimmune diseases.
"Caveats include the small sample size and indirect signal, which assumes the oncology findings translate to autoimmune diseases and these pharmacodynamics/pharmacokinetics markers correlate with clinical benefit," Leerink's Graybosch said in a report.
Still, she has an outperform rating on Nkarta stock.
Shares bounded back over their
50-day moving average on Monday, reversing the Friday downfall, according to MarketSurge.com. Nkarta stock has a perfect
IBD Digital Relative Strength Rating of 99.
