Insilico Medicine has signed a major drug discovery partnership with pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. The deal could be worth up to $2.75 billion and focuses on using artificial intelligence to speed up the development of new medicines.
The Hong Kong-listed biotech company will get $115 million upfront, with additional payments tied to hitting development and sales targets. Lilly gets exclusive worldwide rights to develop and sell the resulting drugs.
How will it work?
The partnership combines Insilico’s AI platforms with Lilly’s drug development experience. Here’s what each company brings:
- Insilico provides its Pharma.AI technology that can identify drug targets and design molecules
- Lilly contributes its clinical development capabilities and disease expertise
- The companies will work together on multiple research programs targeting diseases chosen by Lilly
- Insilico’s AI can supposedly identify targets that affect multiple diseases simultaneously
Lilly gets exclusive rights to develop, manufacture, and sell any drugs that come out of this collaboration. The focus is on oral medicines currently in preclinical development.
Why does it matter?
This deal shows how big pharmaceutical companies are betting on AI to solve drug discovery problems. Traditional drug development is slow and expensive – it typically takes over a decade and costs billions to bring a new medicine to market.
AI promises to speed this up by:
- Identifying new drug targets faster
- Designing molecules more efficiently
- Predicting which compounds are most likely to work
- Reducing the number of failed experiments
For Insilico, the partnership provides validation of its technology and significant funding. For Lilly, it’s a way to expand its pipeline across multiple disease areas without building AI capabilities in-house.
The context
Insilico Medicine is part of a wave of AI-focused biotech companies that have emerged in recent years. The company went public in Hong Kong in 2023 and has been working to prove its technology can actually deliver new drugs.
“From its inception, Insilico Medicine has been developing deep learning for end-to-end drug discovery,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, the company’s founder and CEO. The company claims its AI can create “world models of human and animal life” to identify drug targets.
Lilly, meanwhile, has been actively seeking partnerships to boost its drug pipeline. “Insilico’s AI-enabled discovery capabilities represent a powerful complement to Lilly’s deep expertise in clinical development,” said Andrew Adams, Group Vice President of Molecule Discovery at Lilly.
The pharmaceutical industry has seen several similar AI partnerships recently, as established drug companies look to new technologies to improve their hit rates in drug discovery.