Insilico Medicine, Eli Lilly Sign Up to $2.75 Bn AI Drug Discovery Deal

The agreement includes an upfront payment of $115 million to Insilico, along with additional development, regulatory, and commercial milestone payments.

Insilico Medicine has entered into a drug discovery collaboration with Eli Lilly, with a total deal value of up to $2.75 billion, to advance therapeutics developed using generative artificial intelligence.

The agreement includes an upfront payment of $115 million to Insilico, along with additional development, regulatory, and commercial milestone payments. The deal also includes tiered royalties on potential future sales of successfully commercialized therapies.

Under the collaboration, Eli Lilly will acquire exclusive global rights to select preclinical-stage drug candidates developed by Insilico. These candidates are designed using the company’s proprietary Pharma.AI platform, which applies generative AI to identify disease targets and create novel molecular structures.

In addition to licensing existing assets, the two companies will jointly work on new research and development programs focused on targets selected by Eli Lilly. The collaboration aims to accelerate drug discovery timelines by integrating AI-driven approaches into early-stage development.

Insilico’s platform is designed to support end-to-end drug discovery, from target identification to predicting clinical trial outcomes. The approach uses generative models to design new molecules rather than relying solely on traditional screening of existing chemical libraries.

Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, said the company has focused on deploying deep learning technologies across the drug discovery pipeline. “By deploying frontier AI technologies that scale from biomarkers to life models, we can identify multi-purpose targets driving multiple diseases at the same time,” he said.

The collaboration follows Insilico Medicine’s recent IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and reflects increasing interest from large pharmaceutical companies in AI-led drug discovery. For Eli Lilly, the agreement provides access to AI-designed drug candidates and supports efforts to accelerate research timelines in competitive therapeutic areas.

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