Belharra Therapeutics, Inc. announced a strategic collaboration with Sanofi to advance the discovery of novel small molecule therapeutics for immunological diseases. The collaboration will leverage Belharra's proprietary non-covalent chemoproteomics platform to screen and validate hits against undisclosed Sanofi-designated immunology targets. Belharra is eligible to receive up to $40 million in upfront and near-term milestone payments, with a potential total deal value of up to nearly $700 million in payments over the course of the collaboration in research, development and commercial milestones, as well as tiered royalties on net sales.

Belharra's platform is designed to enable the industry's broadest and most unbiased chemoproteomic screening capabilities. The platform leverages a computationally designed library of non-covalent drug-like molecules that use photoaffinity chemistry to identify which proteins bind the molecules as well as the precise binding location on the target proteins. All screens are conducted in a native cellular environment.

Using this approach, Belharra is able to illuminate any binding pocket on any protein or protein-protein interaction, in any cell type, yielding insights that enable the discovery of new drugs for well-validated but elusive protein targets as well as novel drug targets.