Eli Lilly has signed a multi-year deal with Switzerland-based startup Haya Therapeutics to apply Haya’s advanced RNA-guided regulatory genome platform to support preclinical drug discovery efforts in obesity and related metabolic conditions.
The partners will identify multiple regulatory genome derived RNA-based drug targets to address chronic conditions.
Under the terms of the deal, Haya will receive an upfront payment, including an equity investment, and is eligible to receive up to an aggregate $1 billion in pre-clinical, clinical and commercial milestone payments, as well as royalties on product sales.
Launched in 2021, Haya focuses on the dark genome — the portion of the genome composed of non-protein coding regions — which is dynamically active, generating thousands of therapeutically unexplored long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). LncRNAs regulate disease-associated gene pathways and proteins in response to the environment, triggering a disease-associated cell state.
Haya's proprietary regulatory genome discovery platform enables the identification of tissue-, disease- and cell-specific llncRNA targets and the development of RNA-targeting therapies, with potentially better efficacy and less toxicity than current treatments, to reprogram disease-driving cell states. The collab will utilize Haya's full-stack regulatory genome platform to identify, characterize and validate multiple novel lncRNA targets for the potential development of new treatments.