Been in the news for some reason.
Hong Kong-listed Insilico Medicine signs AI drug development deal with Eli Lilly
Reaching development, regulatory and commercial milestones could see value of deal hit around US$2.75 billion
has signed a potential multibillion-dollar deal with 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”.
Global drug makers such as Lilly racing to license early-stage medicines to replenish pipelines in the next few years as the patents on existing blockbuster treatments begin to expire.
At January’s JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, Lilly also announced a collaboration with chipmaker Nvidia to apply AI across drug discovery, clinical development, and manufacturing.
In November, Lilly entered into a partnership with Insilico that could bring more than US$100 million in potential payments for undisclosed targets.
Lilly was a cornerstone investor in Insilico’s Hong Kong initial public offering, which raised US$293 million in December. Hong Kong Investment Corp, the investment arm of the Hong Kong government, is also an investor in Insilico.
This month, Lilly pledged a US$3 billion investment in China to expand its Suzhou facilities for the production of weight-loss drugs.
Insilico, meanwhile, is joining the ranks of multinational companies in China. Zhavoronkov said the company was developing infrastructure projects in Shanghai’s Pudong district, in partnership with state-backed Shanghai Pudong Development Group.
The facility, expected to be completed by 2028, would be “the most advanced site for drug discovery in the world”, Zhavoronkov said.
reached a record transaction value of US$60 billion in the first quarter of this year, driven by multinational pharmaceutical companies’ growing appetite for the country’s promising drug candidates.
The deal value represented a 73 per cent year-on-year increase, and was the equivalent of nearly half the US$135.7 billion worth of agreements signed for all of last year, the National Medical Products Administration said in a statement on Saturday.
