Eli Lilly Makes $2.75 Billion Bet on AI-Powered Drug Discovery

Pharmaceutical titan Eli Lilly wants to bring medications developed with AI to market.

To that end, the company has struck a $2.75 billion deal, announced Sunday (March 29), with Hong Kong-based Insilico Medicine.

The companies say this collaboration will use Insilico’s artificial intelligence (AI) engine to accelerate the “discovery and development of novel therapeutics.” The agreement gives Lilly exclusive license to develop, manufacture and market these drugs, with the companies teaming on a variety of research and development programs.

“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,” Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico, said in a news release.

“Working with Lilly, we aim to deliver transformative therapies that treat diseases with high unmet need. This collaboration is a testament to the power of AI in tackling the most complex challenges in human health.”

Speaking to CNBC about the partnership, Zhavoronkov said his company has used AI to develop at least 28 drugs, close to half of which are already at a clinical stage.

“In many ways, Lilly is better than us in some areas of AI,” he said, adding the pharmaceutical company has “one person” who has combined biology, chemistry and automation under one roof.

The partnership is the latest example of how the pharmaceutical sector is “moving from AI experiments to real operating use cases,” as PYMNTS wrote recently.

In addition to its agreement with Insilico, Eli Lilly has also, with Nvidia, committed $1 billion over five years to finance “the talent, infrastructure and computing needed to tackle bottlenecks in AI-based drug discovery,” that report added.

Another pharma giant, Roche, is deploying upwards of 3,500 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs across cloud and on-premises systems in the U.S. and Europe to accelerate R&D, diagnostics and manufacturing efficiency.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last week about new AI-health offerings from the likes of Amazon and OpenAI amid increased consumer usage of artificial intelligence for medical needs.

As that report noted, around 60% of American adults turned to AI tools for health reasons in the last three months. And roughly 70% of AI health conversations occur outside clinic hours, and roughly 1.6 million to 1.9 million messages each week on ChatGPT deal with health insurance questions, according to earlier PYMNTS coverage.

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