Nkarta to lay off staff, senior leadership, in bid to advance autoimmune cell therapy

Nkarta is laying off a third of its workforce, and more than half its executive team, in a bid to survive long enough to see if an experimental cell therapy it’s developing will show promise against multiple autoimmune conditions. 

Nkarta revealed the initiative alongside fourth quarter earnings on Wednesday. The cuts will impact 53 positions, freeze some future hires and enable it to operate into 2029. In a statement, CEO Paul Hastings said the restructuring prioritizes “investment in clinical execution and impacts every level of the organization,” including a majority of senior leadership. 

According to a regulatory filing, for example, Chief Strategy and Business Officer Alyssa Levin is being let go effective March 31. The board has appointed current president Nadir Mahmood to take her place as principal financial and accounting officer.

“We believe that this decision is necessary in today’s challenging financial and competitive environment to fulfill Nkarta’s vision of bringing potentially life-saving cellular therapies to people with autoimmune disease,” Hastings said of the layoffs.

The company had 157 full-time employees, and just under $381 million in cash, as of Dec. 31. It booked a net loss of about $109 million in 2024. 

Nkarta raised more than $100 million in private funding before going public in 2020 to develop an emerging type of donor-derived cell therapy. Those treatments harness “natural killer” cells, different immune defenders than the ones involved in personalized cancer cell therapies like Yescarta and Kymriah. Initially, Nkarta intended to prove its therapies could be a convenient, “off-the-shelf” alternative, running multiple trials in leukemia and lymphoma. 

But like many of its peers, Nkarta struggled to show its lead therapy could match the long-lasting benefits of its personalized counterparts. Its share price eroded amid a difficult funding climate for biotechs, making it difficult to raise cash. And last year, the company fully pivoted its research focus to autoimmune conditions, leaning on academic research suggesting these therapies might help “reset” the immune systems of people with diseases like lupus. 

“I believe that our drug is developable in oncology, because usually in Phase 1, you’re discovering and you’re testing different regimens,” Hastings said in an interview in January. “You don’t have the luxury of doing that anymore. If it’s the first time your data comes out, that’s it.”

In shifting its strategy, Nkarta joined more than a dozen companies vying to reproduce that research either with cell therapies or antibody drugs. Still, Nkarta believes its treatments might represent the best solution, offering the power of personalized cell therapies with the convenience of an off-the-shelf solution. Individualized cell therapies are “impractical” for autoimmune conditions, Chief Medical Officer David Shook said in January. It’s also unclear how effective T cell engagers, a popular type of antibody drug being tested in autoimmune diseases, will be, and they also have safety concerns that prevent their widespread use in oncology, he added. 

Nkarta hasn’t yet proven that in human testing. Initial data from a pair of studies evaluating its therapy, NKX019, in multiple autoimmune conditions are expected later this year. 

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