Day One

A dynamic opening discussion featuring CEOs and founders at the forefront of innate immunity and NK-cell innovation. This high-level session sets the tone for the meeting as industry leaders examine the current landscape, emerging scientific and commercial inflection points, and the path to translating innate immune breakthroughs into meaningful therapeutic impact. Through candid insights and forward-looking perspectives, the panel will outline the opportunities, challenges, and decisive moves that will shape the field over the next 3–5 years.

• The milestones that brought innate therapies to today’s inflection point
• What’s driving the next wave of NK and innate innovation
• Scientific and clinical hurdles that must be overcome
• Strategic priorities in a shifting funding and regulatory climate
• Commercial pathways and competitive positioning for the next era

• NanoSpark is a powerful plug-and-play platform tech that has generated next-gen soluble cell therapy reagents
• GROW-NK is one such reagent that drives high performance NK expansion with the lowest form of cell manipulation:
  • No feeder cells
  • No magnetic beads
  • No removal required
• Collaborative story of using patient multiple myeloma cells to do high-throughput screening of anti-BCMA CAR constructs using LNP-mediated mRNA delivery to enhance CAR-NK cell efficacy and safety enabled by NanoSpark® GROW-NK.

Advancing cell and gene therapies from preclinical to clinical stages requires tackling critical manufacturing hurdles. Donor variability, cryopreservation, scalability, and equipment choices, including the use of bioreactors, all impact product quality, reproducibility, and regulatory readiness. This workshop explores practical strategies to strengthen manufacturing systems, mitigate risk, and ensure a smooth transition into the clinic.

Join this workshop to:

• Understand how donor variability and cryopreservation affect product quality, and ways to reduce these risks
• Explore scalability, bioreactor implementation, and equipment decisions that drive consistency and compliance
• Review case-based approaches for moving from preclinical data to robust clinical programs

• Demonstrating safety and feasibility of umbilical cord blood–derived CD34 NK cell therapy with no dose-limiting toxicities or GVHD
• Showcasing in vivo persistence, activation, and cytotoxicity confirming biological activity in AML patients
• Highlighting preliminary clinical responses with blast reduction and MRD clearance supporting next-phase development

• Sustained Long-Term Survival: Extended follow-up demonstrates significant overall survival benefit signal in ASCT eligible multiple myeloma cohorts
• Clinical Durability in High-Risk Populations: Notably, high-risk cytogenetic features by FISH achieved durable remission and long-term survival, suggesting potential broad therapeutic applicability across risk categories
• Advancement Toward Phase II & Beyond: Data support progression to a phase II trial aimed at confirming CR, PFS, and OS, expanding to multi-center sites, and exploring combination strategies to enhance NK-cell persistence and functional potency

• Advancing first-in-human safety, early compassionate-use cases show no adverse events in patients treated with NK101, supporting a favorable emerging safety profile ahead of IND submission
• Demonstrating NK-cell persistence and immune engagement, immune-monitoring data show NK-cell levels rising from <2% to ~18% post-infusion in one patient, indicating meaningful in vivo activity
• Informing clinical development and indication strategy, early real-world experience is guiding prioritization, dosing, and translational endpoints as NKore moves toward first-in-human trials

• SENTI-202 is well tolerated in patients with R/R AML
• SENTI-202 demonstrates promising preliminary efficacy
• Will present data from ≥20 R/R AML patients

• Demonstrated immune control: iNKT cells act as master regulators of innate and adaptive immunity, reducing pathologic inflammation, promoting tissue repair, and restoring immune homeostasis across inflammatory diseases.
• Clinically validated, allogeneic platform: Off-the-shelf iNKT “living medicines” demonstrate rapid deployability, predictable safety, and scalable manufacturing in immune-dysregulated settings.
• Oncology expansion: With safety, trafficking, and immune modulation established, MiNK is extending iNKT biology into engineered and combination programs— including T-cell engagers (TCEs) and armored FAP-CAR-INKT —to drive deeper efficacy in cancer.

• Long-term success in innate cell therapies requires more than early-stage capital, it depends on sustainable financing strategies that support manufacturing scale-up, clinical progression, and commercial readiness
• This interactive roundtable will bring together participants to explore how companies can structure deals, partnerships, and milestone-driven financing models that appeal to pharma, VCs, and strategic investors alike

Join us for an interactive poster session where leading industry researchers and academic professionals present the latest findings, share insights, and engage in discussions on emerging scientific advances. This session offers an opportunity to explore innovative data, ask questions directly and connect with peers across the field. To find out how you can get involved, visit the website for more details.

What’s the development roadmap for the next decade in cell and gene therapies, and how do technologies build on one another rather than compete?

• Lessons learned from autologous CAR-T to inform next generation designs
• Accelerating allogeneic platforms into the clinic as scalable, off-the-shelf solutions
• The integration potential: how today’s allo approaches can feed into tomorrow’s in vivo delivery models
• Patient access: how to make sure patients benefit at each stage of this innovation curve

• Applying AI-driven analysis to develop predictive models of donor performance
• Leveraging machine learning models to guide CAR-NK engineering and manufacturing decisions
• Integrating machine learning into preclinical and clinical workflows to continuously improve product efficacy