SECOND INNATE PHARMA NK CELL ENGAGER SELECTED BY SANOFI AS DRUG CANDIDATE FOR DEVELOPMENT
Innate Pharma SA (Euronext Paris: IPH; Nasdaq: IPHA) (“Innate” or the “Company”) today announced that Sanofi has made the decision to progress IPH6401/SAR’514 into investigational new drug (IND)-enabling studies, triggering a €3 million milestone payment.
IPH6401/SAR’514 is a BCMA-targeting NK cell engager using Sanofi’s proprietary CROSSODILE® multi-functional platform, which comprises the Cross-Over-Dual-Variable-Domain (CODV) format. It induces a dual targeting of the NK activating receptors, NKp46 and CD16, for an optimized NK cell activation, based on Innate’s ANKETTM (Antibody-based NK cell Engager Therapeutics) proprietary platform. NK cell engagers are an alternative for cancer treatment aiming to offer an improved therapeutic window as compared to bispecific T lymphocyte-engaging formats.
IPH6401/SAR’514 has shown anti-tumor activity and promising drug properties in pre-clinical models. Sanofi will be responsible for all future development, manufacturing and commercialization of IPH6401/SAR’514.
“We are pleased that Sanofi has chosen to progress IPH6401/SAR’514 into development, building on our strong partnership which brought the first NKp46-based NK cell engager to the clinic last year,” said Pr. Eric Vivier, DVM-PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Innate Pharma. “Innate/Sanofi’s collaboration integrating Sanofi's multi-functional CODV format and the dual NK cell targeting based on Innate's multifunctional ANKET platform is creating an entirely new class of molecules to induce synthetic immunity against cancer, which have been designed to belong to the next wave of impactful medicines in immunotherapy.”
This milestone is part of the previously announced research collaboration with Sanofi, under which the companies collaborate on the generation and evaluation of up to two bispecific NK cell engagers, using the ANKET platform from Innate that simultaneously targets two NK activating receptors, NKp46 and CD16, to optimize NK cell activation and Sanofi’s proprietary antibody format as well as anti-tumor target antibodies. In 2021, the companies announced plans to develop IPH6101/SAR’579, which is in Phase 1/2 in relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia (R/R AML), B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) and high risk-myelodysplastic syndrome (HR-MDS).
About the Innate-Sanofi agreement:
The Company has a research collaboration and licensing agreement with Sanofi to apply Innate’s proprietary platform to the development of innovative multi-specific antibody formats engaging NK cells through the activating receptors NKp46 and CD16 to kill tumor cells now called the ANKET platform.
Under the terms of the license agreement, Sanofi will be responsible for the development, manufacturing and commercialization of products resulting from the research collaboration. Innate Pharma will be eligible to up to €400m in development and commercial milestone payments as well as royalties on net sales.
About ANKETTM:
ANKETTM (Antibody-based NK cell Engager Therapeutics) is Innate's proprietary platform for developing next-generation, multi-specific natural killer (NK) cell engagers to treat certain types of cancer.
