Unleashing Natural Killer Cells So Patients Can Live Cancer FREE

What is the critical gap in cancer treatment that you are addressing?

We now know that cancer cells across all types of cancers can block a patient’s immune system and so that their immune cells are unable to recognize cancer cells that are harming the body. The war on cancer is more challenging than we thought because surviving cancer requires that we make cancer cells visible to the immune system. 

NKILT has created a way of engineering immune cells so that tumor cells are visible and vulnerable to our immune cells. The immune cells we have engineered are called Natural Killer cells (or NK cells). They are known to be active players in the immune response. With our novel immunotherapy, called CIR-NK cells (engineered NK cells), we expect to help limit and hopefully eradicate the chance of recurrent cancer. We are testing CIR-NK in leukemia and then in colon cancer and we expect that treated patients will be cancer-free for longer. We believe we are onto something!

What is the key product development milestone you seek to fund?

We are currently raising $5M to support the development of our first products (CIR-NK cells) in leukemia (AML) and colorectal cancer. One important milestone is to test how well CIR-NK cells can find and kill cancer cells, while verifying that they don’t attack normal cells. This will be accomplished in animal models and will allow us to reach our next major milestone which is to initiate dialog with FDA in preparation for future clinical trials.

How will funds be used?

To support this very important initial animal study, we will need $100K. With these funds, we will launch our first mouse study to track how our engineered CIR-NK cells behave in mouse models and to better understand how long they remain active in these animals.

What key resources have/will you acquire to facilitate the accomplishment of the above product development milestone? 

We need to expand our technical team with at least two more scientists. This will enable us to launch multiple studies in parallel to assess the properties of our immunotherapy and determine if it is safe. Funds raised on this platform will allow us to generate additional data and evidence to support our $5M raise. We are also filing, in the coming weeks, a few grants (CPRIT and SBIR) to complement our fundraising effort.

If your Technology were to disappear in the “Valley of Death” funding bottleneck how might this impact society?

In 2020, there were close to 20 million people with cancer with half of them resulting in death. The need to bring more options for cancer patients remains critical and NKILT has an answer that could radically change standard of care and survival for cancer patients.

Our exciting science already indicates that CIR-NK cells are potent killers of cancer cells. This gives us hope for patients that will have access to a powerful new treatment for out living cancer.

Multiple options for patients are needed throughout their cancer journey and it is critical to build the scientific foundation, development and commercial structure to bring those innovative new treatments to cancer patients. We won’t be able to succeed alone. Our objective is to build our own development structure and partner with key players (starting with AML and colorectal cancer) to increase our chance of success. We will also plan to partner with larger biotech/pharma companies that have established their position in cell therapy to build a manufacturing and commercial structure to ensure our treatments are delivered to all patients in need – world wide.

Remember, up to 50% of cancer patients could benefit from our approach… and that’s how we will make an impact on beating cancer!

Website: NKILT

Media Interviews:

The Science Advisory Board (Nov.2022): https://www.scienceboard.net/index.aspx?sec=rca&sub=MESA_2022&pag=dis&ItemID=4901

CGTLive (Apr.2023): https://www.cgtlive.com/view/rapha-l-ognar-on-developing-cir-nk-cells-to-better-target-cancer-cells

Presentations of PoC data (presentation & poster):

Advanced Therapies, London (Mar.2023),

Innate Killer Summit, San Diego (Mar.2023),

Meeting on the MED, Barcelona (Apr.2023),

World Oncology Cell Therapy Summit, Boston (Apr.2023)

Raphael G. Ognar  

CEO & Co-Founder

Raphaël is a pharma/biotech executive with more than 25 years of commercial, drug development, product lifecycle, and strategy expertise. Throughout his career, he has developed extensive expertise in oncology/hematology, immuno-oncology, and cell therapy as a result of his recognized leadership skills in strategy and operations.

Besides fighting cancer, his passions are vintage wines, playing music in his family band, pushing himself rock climbing with his wife, and traveling the world with friends and family.

Raphaël has a master’s degree and a DEA (master’s) of physiology and neurosciences from the Universities of Bordeaux I and II and a master’s of business administration in strategic marketing and enterprise management from the Institut d’Administration des Entreprises (IAE) of Tours University.

Henri Bayle 

Chief Technical Officer & Co-Founder

Hank has extensive experience in the development of new approaches to chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) and CAR natural killer (CAR-NK) cell therapy from discovery to translation in the clinic from his work as a scientist and executive at Bellicum Pharmaceuticals. Previously he was an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine. He received his PhD in molecular biology from Princeton University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Simon Wain-Hobson

Chief Scientific Officer & Co-Founder

Simon has published more than 230 papers in virology and cancer. Working with Luc Montagnier, he was first to sequence the genome of the AIDS virus HIV. He holds patents for the AIDS virus and 10 others. In addition to co-founding NKILT Therapeutics, he is a co-founder of Invectys, a US biotech company vaccinating against cancer. Simon received his DPhil in biochemistry from the University of Oxford and completed postdoctoral work in immunology at the Weizmann Institute. He was a tenured researcher, then professor, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the Academia Europaea, and the US National Academy of Inventors. His accolades include Laureate, André Lwoff Prize; Laureate, Athena Prize, French Academy of Sciences; Officier de la Légion d’Honneur; and Officer of the Order of the British Empire.