ImmunityBio (formerly known as NantKwest) is a clinical-stage immunotherapy company focused on harnessing the power of the immune system using natural killer (NK) cells to treat cancer, infectious diseases, and inflammatory diseases. The Company's NK cell-based platform, with the capacity to grow active killer cells as a biological cancer therapy, has been designed to induce cell death against cancer or infected cells by three different modes of action: direct killing using activated NK cells (aNK) that release toxic granules directly into the cell through cell to cell contact; antibody-mediated killing using haNKs, which are NK cells engineered to incorporate a high-affinity receptor that binds to an administered antibody, enhancing the cancer cell killing effect of that antibody, and Target-activated killing using taNKs, which are NK cells engineered to incorporate chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) to target tumor-specific antigens found on the surface of cancer cells. NantKwest was merged with ImmunityBio.