Insilico Medicine and Eli Lilly partner in AI drug discovery deal worth up to $100M

On November 10, Insilico Medicine, a global leader in generative artificial intelligence-driven biotechnology, announced a strategic drug discovery collaboration with Eli Lilly, a leading multinational pharmaceutical company. The partnership will leverage the cutting-edge capabilities of Insilico's proprietary AI drug discovery platform Pharma.AI, combined with Lilly's extensive expertise in drug development and disease research, to accelerate the discovery and development of innovative therapies.

Under the agreement, Insilico will apply its extensively validated Pharma.AI platform and professional drug discovery capabilities to generate, design, and optimize candidate compounds for innovative targets identified by both parties. Insilico is eligible to receive up to $100 million (approximately RMB 712 million) from this collaboration, including an upfront payment, research and development milestone payments, and tiered royalties on future net sales of any commercialized products.

This collaboration marks a significant upgrade in the partnership between the two companies. As early as 2023, Insilico and Lilly had established an AI platform software licensing agreement, which laid a solid foundation for the current strategic collaboration.

Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder and Co-CEO of Insilico Medicine, expressed his honor to embark on this in-depth collaboration with Eli Lilly, a global leader in the pharmaceutical industry. "Lilly's outstanding achievements in innovation and R&D are highly admirable, and the company has been a significant collaborator in utilizing our self-developed AI drug discovery platform, Pharma.AI," said Zhavoronkov. "This drug discovery partnership not only demonstrates our partner's strong recognition of Insilico's AI-driven R&D capabilities but also reinforces our long-term collaborative relationship. We look forward to working together to accelerate the development of innovative therapies and better address the urgent needs of patients worldwide."

Leveraging cutting-edge AI and automation technologies, Insilico Medicine has significantly enhanced early-stage drug discovery efficiency. While traditional early drug discovery processes typically require 3 to 6 years, from 2021 to 2024, Insilico Medicine nominated 20 preclinical candidates. The company's projects have taken an average of only 12 to 18 months from initiation to preclinical candidate nomination, with each project requiring the synthesis and testing of just 60 to 200 molecules, demonstrating a substantial improvement in R&D speed and resource utilization efficiency.