Innate Pharma cashes $15million milestone payment from Bristol-Myers for lirilumab-Opdivo testing

Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) has paid Innate Pharma $15 million payment milestone in connection with the licensing deal for testing lirilumab in combination with Opdivo.

The milestone was reached after the annual meeting of Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer in November 2016, and positive results from the Squamous Cell Cancer of the Head and Neck phase 2 trial.

The results suggest that combinations of lirilumab and nivolumab could provide better clinical activity with PD-L1 positive tumors.

Pierre Dodion, Chief Medical Officer at Innate Pharma, said: “The combination of lirilumab with nivolumab showed encouraging early efficacy signals in the initial part of the trial which support the strategy of simultaneously targeting the KIR and PD-1 pathways with lirilumab and nivolumab, respectively; the reported data point to broader potential for lirilumab. We look forward to further investigation of the combination in the Phase II part of this trial.”

In total, Bristol-Myers Squibb is currently investigating lirilumab in six trials, across a range of solid and hematological cancer indications, in monotherapy and in combination with other agents, and Innate Pharma is responsible for conducting the EffiKIR trial, a randomized Phase II trial evaluating lirilumab as a single agent in patients with acute myeloid leukemia