Lilly Signs $2.75B AI Drug Discovery Deal With Insilico
Insilico Medicine and Eli Lilly have entered a multi-program AI-driven drug discovery collaboration, combining Insilico’s generative modeling platforms with Lilly’s clinical and commercialization infrastructure. Under the agreement, Insilico receives $115 million upfront, with potential milestone payments bringing the total deal value to approximately $2.75 billion, in addition to tiered royalties on future product sales.
The partnership gives Lilly exclusive worldwide rights to develop, manufacture, and commercialize a portfolio of preclinical-stage small-molecule oral therapeutics generated using Insilico’s end-to-end Pharma.AI platform stack.
The companies will jointly run additional discovery programs on targets selected by Lilly, combining internal datasets and disease expertise with Insilico’s generative models.
According to STAT, a recent update to Insilico’s pipeline webpage indicates that a GLP-1–targeting candidate has been out-licensed to an undisclosed partner, pointing to a possible overlap with metabolic disease programs aligned with Lilly’s existing obesity drugs portfolio.
The current agreement builds on a collaboration between the companies that began in 2023. In 2025, the deal was already expanded to include up to $100 million in upfront and milestone payments.
Hong Kong-listed Insilico is among the more established AI-driven drug discovery firms, with platforms covering multiple stages of the drug development pipeline. It has previously reported multiple AI-designed candidates advancing into clinical development, including ISM8969, an NLRP3 inhibitor cleared by the FDA for Phase I trials, and ISM5411, a gut-restricted PHD inhibitor currently in a Phase II trial for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
See also: FDA Shifts Drug Approval Policy: What Does This Mean for AI-Enabled Therapies?
Insilico Medicine’s CEO, Alex Zhavoronkov, recently stated that fully AI-designed drugs could reach the market by around 2030, meaning that end-to-end AI-driven pipelines will begin translating into approved therapies within the next five to six years.
AI Platforms and Infrastructure Context
Insilico’s Pharma.AI combines agents for finding new disease targets, designing molecules, predicting how they can be made, and testing their safety and effectiveness. The platform also includes systems for running simulations, managing lab workflows, and analyzing large biological datasets, along with AI assistants that help researchers interact with data and design experiments.
Recently, Insilico also released Science MMAI Gym, a training framework designed to fine-tune general-purpose large language models (LLMs) into domain-specific systems for chemistry, biology, and clinical research.
In recent years, Eli Lilly has greatly expanded its AI capabilities through a combination of external collaborations and the development of in-house computational infrastructure and models. Recently, it deployed LillyPod, a large-scale AI supercomputer built with over 1,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and designed to train foundation models across drug discovery, genomics, and clinical development workflows.
Through Benchling and Revvity, Lilly also offers access to TuneLab, its federated AI platform that gives external biotech partners access to Lilly models trained on more than $1 billion worth of proprietary drug discovery data, including preclinical, safety, ADME, PK/PD, and molecular optimization datasets.
Topic: Industry Movers
