Lilly Taps Insilico Medicine's AI in $100M Drug Discovery Collaboration
Insilico Medicine has entered a research and licensing collaboration with Eli Lilly, expanding their existing partnership to jointly discover novel therapeutics using Insilico’s Pharma.AI platform. The collaboration builds on a prior software licensing agreement signed in 2023, under which Lilly became a user of Insilico’s AI drug discovery tools.
Under the new agreement, Insilico will apply its generative AI platform to generate, design, and optimize compounds against targets defined collaboratively with Lilly. The deal includes over $100 million in potential payments to Insilico, including upfront and milestone payments, along with tiered royalties on net sales of any resulting products.
According to Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Founder and Co-CEO of Insilico Medicine, "this expanded collaboration further recognizes Insilico’s AI-driven drug discovery capabilities while strengthening our longstanding partnership." The company nominated 21 preclinical candidates between 2021 and 2024 (now at 22), with an average time to PCC of approximately 13 months—compared to traditional timelines of 2.5 to 4 years.
Rentosertib, Insilico’s anti-fibrotic candidate, recently completed a Phase 2a trial with results published in Nature Medicine, while its gut-restricted PHD1/2 inhibitor for IBD, ISM5411, has advanced through Phase I.
Insilico Medicine’s pipeline includes 31 programs, with 22 preclinical candidates nominated since 2021 and 10 IND-approved assets, all discovered using its Pharma.AI platform.
Pharma.AI is a modular platform for AI-driven drug discovery, combining generative design, target and disease modeling, and automated lab execution into a unified system. Built around foundation models trained on chemical, biological, and clinical data, the platform supports everything from hypothesis generation and molecule design to preclinical optimization and trial prediction. The platform is designed to operate independently or as a cohesive end-to-end system for AI-enabled pharmaceutical research. It also serves partners in adjacent fields such as agriculture, veterinary medicine, and materials science.
Last week, the company disclosed eight AI-designed oral small-molecule programs for cardiometabolic diseases at BIO-Europe. These assets are built for low-dose combinations and include a once-weekly oral GLP-1R agonist, aligning with growing interest in GLP-1s as potential first-in-class longevity therapeutics.
Topic: Industry Movers
