US pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Hong Kong-listed Insilico Medicine have reached a cooperation agreement totaling up to US$2.75 billion to bring the latter's new drugs developed using artificial intelligence to the global market.
According to the announcement issued by the two parties on Monday, Eli Lilly will pay an upfront payment of US$115 million to Insilicon Intelligent, and the remaining payment will be linked to subsequent regulatory approvals and commercialization progress. In addition, Insilicon Intelligent will also receive royalties from future product sales.
Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Intelligence, told the media that the company has developed at least 28 drugs under development with the help of generative artificial intelligence tools, nearly half of which have entered clinical trials. The company was listed in Hong Kong in December last year, and its stock price has increased by more than 50% this year.
Zavoronkov said that in some areas related to artificial intelligence, "Eli Lilly does a better job than us in many aspects" and specifically mentioned that there is a key figure within Eli Lilly who can integrate biology, chemistry and automation on the same platform. According to this cooperation arrangement, Yingsi Intelligent will also join the "Gateway Labs" community, Eli Lilly's biotechnology incubation and cooperation platform, to accelerate the development and transformation of new drugs.
In fact, the two companies have already cooperated through an artificial intelligence-based software licensing agreement as early as 2023. This new transaction is a further upgrade and expansion on the existing basis. Andrew Adams, group vice president of Eli Lilly's Molecular Discovery Division, said in a statement that the collaboration will help both parties "explore new mechanisms of action and accelerate the identification of promising candidate therapies across multiple disease areas." He believes that Insilicon’s AI-enabled drug discovery platform is a “powerful complement” to Eli Lilly’s clinical development capabilities.
Eli Lilly CEO David A. Ricks went to Beijing to attend a high-level forum earlier this month. Not long ago, Eli Lilly announced that it would invest US$3 billion in China over the next ten years. The company disclosed that revenue from the Chinese market accounted for slightly less than 3% of its total revenue last year.
Zavoronkov said that Yingyi Intelligent's artificial intelligence R&D team is mainly located in Canada and the Middle East, and early preclinical drug development work based on these AI results is carried out in China. He pointed out that compared with traditional research and development methods, artificial intelligence can not only shorten the development cycle of new drugs, but also design and synthesize molecular structures more quickly, which is expected to significantly improve research and development efficiency.
This cooperation is regarded as another landmark case of the deep integration between large global pharmaceutical companies and emerging AI pharmaceutical companies. On the one hand, it highlights the external cooperation needs of multinational pharmaceutical companies in innovation pipelines and technology stacks. On the other hand, it also opens up a broader international commercialization channel for biopharmaceutical startups with generative AI as their core technology.