Eli Lilly’s latest attempt to strengthen its genetic medicine offering has seen the Big Pharma team up with Profluent to develop AI-designed recombinases to address diseases with severe unmet needs.
Emeryville, California-based Profluent describes itself as a “frontier AI company pioneering large-scale foundation models for protein design.” Profluent has claimed to be the first company to demonstrate that large language models can generate functional proteins, while touting its atlas of over 115 billion unique proteins as being the “largest protein data resource in the world.”
Those credentials have attracted big-name investors, with Bezos Expeditions —which manages the personal investments of tech titan Jeff Bezos—co-leading on Profluent’s $106 million funding round last November.
Now, Lilly wants a piece of the action. This morning’s deal will see Profluent use its AI models to design site-specific recombinases for a number of genomic targets, while Lilly gets a license to advance these recombinases into preclinical development and beyond.
In return, Profluent will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and could also be in line for up to $2.25 billion in development and commercial milestone payments, along with tiered royalties on net sales should any of the resulting genetic meds make it to market.
“Kilobase-scale DNA editing remains a holy grail in genetic medicine,” Profluent CEO Ali Madani said in the April 28 release.
“Our work with Lilly is aimed at unlocking these therapeutics previously thought impossible,” Madani added. “We believe only AI can create the designer recombinases needed to precisely target any location in the genome.”
It’s the second recombinase-focused pact that Lilly has signed this year. Back in January, the Indianapolis Big Pharma agreed a $1.12 billion collaboration with Seamless Therapeutics to use the German biotech’s recombinase platform to create treatments for hearing loss.
Buoyed with Mounjaro cash, Lilly has been on a deal-making spree that has included buying gene editing partner Verve Therapeutics for $1 billion upfront, inflammation biotech Ventyx for $1.2 billion upfront, and in vivo CAR-T company Kelonia Therapeutics in a $3.2 billion upfront deal, to name just a few. The collaboration with Profluent comes a day after the Big Pharma bought Ajax Therapeutics in a $2.3 billion deal for its clinical-stage myelofibrosis therapy.
