Innate Pharma SA 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.