The agreement grants Lilly an exclusive worldwide license to a portfolio of preclinical oral therapeutics.
Insilico Medicine struck a drug discovery collaboration with Eli Lilly worth upwards of $2.75 billion.
Emerging Pharma Leaders nominations are now open!
Do you know someone who can make tough decisions that continue to face manufacturers? Are they destined to change the future of pharma?
Nominate a colleague with impressive leadership and career intentions – even yourself! – for the Pharmaceutical Executive 2026 Emerging Pharma Leaders Awards.
The deal marks one of the largest AI-driven drug discovery deals in the industry and reflects a deepening partnership between the two companies that dates back to 2023.
Per the terms of the agreement, Lilly is set to receive an exclusive worldwide license to develop, manufacture, and commercialize a portfolio of novel oral therapeutics currently in preclinical development across multiple therapeutic areas.1
The two companies are also expected to collaborate on additional R&D programs built around targets selected by Lilly, combining Insilico's Pharma.AI platform with Lilly's clinical development capabilities and disease-area expertise.
Insilico is eligible to receive $115 million upfront, with development, regulatory, and commercial milestones that could bring the total value to approximately $2.75 billion, plus tiered royalties on future sales.1
The recent agreement is the culmination of a relationship that began in 2023, when Lilly first licensed Insilico's Pharma.AI software suite. That initial agreement expanded in November 2025 into a research collaboration under which the two companies began jointly discovering and advancing drug candidates against Lilly-selected targets, with Insilico eligible for over $100 million in upfront payments, milestones, and royalties.2 The latest agreement significantly scales that relationship, adding an exclusive worldwide license for a preclinical portfolio and broadening the scope of joint R&D programs.
Andrew Adams, group vice president of molecule discovery at Lilly, said Insilico's AI-enabled discovery capabilities represent a powerful complement to Lilly's expertise across therapeutic areas.
"This collaboration allows us to explore novel mechanisms and accelerate the identification of promising therapeutic candidates across multiple disease areas," said Adams.
Insilico has built an end-to-end generative AI engine for drug discovery, spanning target identification, molecule design, and preclinical candidate nomination.2 Its Pharma.AI platform uses generative AI and automation to dramatically compress the timelines that make early-stage drug discovery slow and costly.
“From its inception, Insilico Medicine has been developing deep learning for end-to-end drug discovery. By deploying frontier AI technologies that scale from biomarkers to life models, world models of human and animal life, we can identify multi-purpose targets driving multiple diseases at the same time,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico.
Between 2021 and 2024, Insilico nominated 20 preclinical candidates with an average turnaround of just 12 to 18 months per program, compared to the three to six years typically required in conventional drug discovery, while synthesizing and testing only 60 to 200 molecules per program.2
Zhavoronkov, says the platform is designed to identify multi-purpose targets driving multiple diseases simultaneously. "By deploying frontier AI technologies that scale from biomarkers to life models, world models of human and animal life, we can identify multi-purpose targets driving multiple diseases at the same time," he said. "This collaboration is a testament to the power of AI in tackling the most complex challenges in human health."
For Silico the deal adds another drug development agreement to its pipeline as the company preciously entered a drug development
