Eli Lilly and Genesis Therapeutics shook on a $670 million agreement to develop new therapies using Genesis’ AI drug discovery platform.
Under the agreement, California-based Genesis and Lilly will partner on three initial targets, and Lilly will have the option to nominate two more targets, for a total of five. For each of the three, Genesis will receive an upfront payment of $20 million, with the potential to receive two more for an additional $20 million per target. Genesis will also have the option to get royalties from the sales.
The announcement did not include information about the specific drug areas that the companies are looking to target.
Genesis, a biotech that focuses on addressing previously undruggable and data-poor targets, will lend its AI drug discovery platform to Lilly for the collaboration. Both companies will contribute engineers and scientists to discover new drug candidates across a range of platforms.
“In our experience, partnerships thrive when both parties bring unique and complementary technologies and insights to the table,” said Evan Feinburg, CEO of Genesis.
Lilly isn’t the only company teaming up with Genesis. In October 2020, Genesis and Genentech teamed up to use Genesis’ graph machine learning and expertise in drug discovery to discover small molecules for challenging disease targets across multiple disease areas.