Insilico Medicine announces alliance with Eli Lilly to apply generative AI in drug candidate discovery

Insilico Medicine has entered a collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company to combine its Pharma.AI generative artificial intelligence platform with Lilly’s disease expertise in order to design and optimise drug candidates more rapidly. The agreement, which could be worth more than US$100 million in combined upfront, milestone and royalty payments, aims to shorten early-stage discovery timelines and deliver novel treatments

Insilico Medicine, a clinical-stage company that uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) for drug discovery, has announced a research collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company. The two organisations intend to combine Insilico’s Pharma.AI platforms with Lilly’s development and disease expertise to identify and advance novel candidate therapies across selected targets.

Under the agreement, Insilico will use its validated Pharma.AI platform and internal drug discovery capabilities to generate, design and optimise candidate compounds against targets that the partners define together. Insilico has stated that it is eligible to receive more than US$100 million in total payments. This figure includes an upfront payment, milestone funding tied to progress in research and development, and tiered royalties on net sales if any resulting drug products reach commercialisation.

“We are delighted to collaborate with Lilly, a global leader in the pharmaceutical industry, renowned for its commitment to medical innovation,” said Dr Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and co-chief executive of Insilico Medicine.

“Lilly has been a valued user of our Pharma.AI software suite, and this expanded collaboration further recognises Insilico’s AI-driven drug discovery capabilities while strengthening our longstanding partnership.

“By joining forces, we are accelerating the development of transformative therapies to address urgent patient needs worldwide,” said Zhavoronkov.

The collaboration has deepened a relationship that began with an AI-based software licensing agreement in 2023. In that earlier arrangement, Lilly secured access to Insilico’s software tools to support its internal discovery work. The current deal extends that interaction beyond software use alone to include joint efforts to generate drug candidates.

Insilico has reported that it has used state-of-the-art AI and automation technologies to improve the efficiency of preclinical drug development. While traditional early-stage drug discovery often requires three to six years from target nomination to preclinical candidate, Insilico has nominated 20 preclinical candidates between 2021 and 2024.

The company has stated that it achieved an average turnaround from project initiation to preclinical candidate nomination of approximately 12 to 18 months per programme. According to Insilico, each of these programmes required synthesis and testing of only 60 to 200 molecules, a relatively small number in comparison with many conventional discovery campaigns that can evaluate thousands of compounds.

These figures illustrate the central promise of generative AI in drug discovery: to narrow and enrich the chemical search space before laboratory synthesis, so that project teams ultimately test a smaller number of candidate molecules but with a higher probability of success. In practical terms, this approach could shorten discovery timelines, reduce cost and focus resources on finding compounds with more favourable predicted properties, such as potency, selectivity and pharmacokinetics.

Insilico Medicine describes itself as a global biotechnology company that uses AI to support drug discovery and development. It has stated that it combines its proprietary Pharma.AI platform with a cutting-edge automated laboratory to accelerate drug discovery and to advance innovation in life sciences research.

The company has reported that it focuses on therapeutic areas that include fibrosis, oncology, immunology, pain, obesity and metabolic disorders, with an emphasis on unmet medical need.

In parallel with its pharmaceutical activities, Insilico has indicated that it has extended use of its Pharma.AI platform into other sectors, such as advanced materials, agriculture, nutritional products and veterinary medicine, where computational design of novel molecules and materials can also provide value.