In a departure from most deals, startup insitro will in-license Lilly’s delivery technology for its investigational liver-targeted siRNA therapies. The pharma will be eligible for milestones and royalties down the line.
Eli Lilly and AI startup insitro on Wednesday announced they have entered into three strategic agreements to advance new therapies for metabolic diseases, particularly metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease.
Unlike other AI-driven drug development deals, the flow of assets under Wednesday’s contracts is reversed. As per the first two agreements, insitro will have the option to in-license a clinical-stage ternary N-acetylgalactosamine (GalNAc) delivery method from Lilly. The biotech intends to use this technology with two of its investigational siRNA therapies, each directed against a liver target.
In the third contract, Lilly and insitro will work collaboratively to discover and develop an antibody therapy for a “novel target” for another metabolic disease. The partners will work together through the preclinical stage and until candidate nomination, after which insitro will take over clinical development and commercialization.
The companies did not specify what disease each agreement will focus on, only revealing that all three contracts are geared toward developing novel treatments for metabolic diseases, particularly metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD). No upfront payment was disclosed, but across all three agreements, Lilly will be entitled to milestone payments and royalties.
Insitro CEO Daphne Koller said in a statement that the partnership with Lilly will help the biotech “accelerate our therapeutic programs toward the clinic.”
The therapeutic core of Wednesday’s deal is insitro’s proprietary machine learning platform, which according to Koller leverages “multimodal data at scale, computational power, and genetics.”
According to its website, insitro’s platform draws from human genetics to identify “causal intervention points” in diseases and combines that with human and cellular phenotypic data to yield effective potential therapies. Insitro’s overall approach “brings nebulous human biology into focus” and leads to a clearer understanding of diseases, opening up better therapeutic options.
With Wednesday’s Lilly deal, insitro joins the growing number of AI startups that have partnered with big pharma to produce better drugs.
In June 2024, for instance, Lilly signed a partnership with OpenAI, specifically designed to address drug-resistant infections. Terms of the deal were scant, but Lilly said at the time that it plans to use the AI technology to produce novel microbial agents for pathogens that have evolved multiple resistances to existing treatments.
Meanwhile, Flagship Pioneering’s Generate:Biomedicines last month bagged $65 million upfront from pharma powerhouse Novartis—alongside the promise of performance-based milestones and royalties—for an agreement of up to $1 billion in value. The partners have yet to disclose what their priority targets are or their therapeutic area of focus.
