Hong Kong-listed Insilico Medicine signs AI drug development deal with Eli Lilly

Life Star2, Insilico’s automation lab.

Photo: Handout Insilico Medicine has signed a potential multibillion-dollar deal with Eli Lilly to license out an early-stage drug pipeline and provide its artificial intelligence platform services in research and development collaborations.

Under the agreement announced on Monday, US-headquartered, Hong Kong-listed Insilico will receive an upfront payment of US$115 million.

The deal could have a total value of around US$2.75 billion tied to development, regulatory and commercial milestones, plus tiered royalties on future sales.

The drugs and their disease areas were not disclosed due to contract restrictions.

However, Alex Zhavoronkov, the founder and CEO of 12-year-old Insilico, said that “some of those broad-spectrum, multi-target, multi-disease drugs may have been part of this deal”.

He said Insilico had been developing several drugs targeting fibrosis, inflammatory, oncology and other age-related pathways into clinical-stage development. “These assets could also be applied to oncology, cardiovascular and other disease areas,” Zhavoronkov said.

The announcement described the compounds as “potentially best-in-class, novel oral therapeutics in preclinical development”.

The deal will give US pharmaceutical giant Lilly exclusive global rights for their development, manufacturing and commercialisation.

As part of the collaboration, Insilico will use its Pharma.ai platforms, which can interpret genomics and other biological data to generate novel drug molecule structures, to support “multiple” research and development programmes focused on targets selected by Lilly. “By deploying frontier AI technologies that scale from biomarkers to life models, world models of human and animal life, we can identify multipurpose targets driving multiple diseases at the same time,” Zhavoronkov said in a statement released by Insilico. “Working with Lilly, we aim to deliver transformative therapies that treat diseases with high unmet need.

This collaboration is a testament to the power of AI in tackling the most complex challenges in human health.” Lilly’s group vice-president of molecule discovery, Andrew Adams, said in the statement that the collaboration would allow it to “explore novel mechanisms and accelerate the identification of promising therapeutic candidates across multiple disease areas”.

Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine.

Photo: Handout Global drug makers such as Lilly racing to license earl

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