Onward Therapeutics SA (Onward Therapeutics) and Emercell SAS (Emercell) announced today the recent exercise of Onward Therapeutics’ second of three instalments of equity investment in Emercell. With this investment, Onward Therapeutics has become Emercell’s majority shareholder.
Emercell has developed a platform technology to produce off-the-shelf natural killer (NK) cells. NK cells are highly potent immune effectors, used alone as a monotherapy, or in combination with therapeutic antibodies, or are genetically engineered to produce Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)-NK cells for the treatment of hematological malignancies and solid tumors. NK-001 is an optimized cell therapy product consisting of highly activated and alloreactive allogeneic NK cells. Its patented manufacturing process allows full industrialization using the same batch of NK cells for multiple patients.
“This second equity investment in Emercell confirms that the NK-001 project has been advancing well since our first equity investment in February 2021, and we will be able to scale up and industrialize the production of activated NK cells rapidly, to offer new treatments for cancer patients,” said Dr. C. Grace Yeh, Chairman and CEO of Onward Therapeutics.
“We are pleased that the collaboration with Onward Therapeutics has reached another critical milestone. Their investment allows us to pursue the NK-001 project and focus on the production of clinical batches,” declared Dr. Patrick Henno, Founder and CEO of Emercell. “We can also start looking at further optimizing our production process for NK cells and exploring other potential new cell therapies,” commented Dr. Alain Herrera, Chairman of the board of Emercell.
