The companies have yet to disclose how many programs they plan to collaborate on or what indications they will prioritize.
For the second time in as many weeks, Eli Lilly is taking out its checkbook to gain access to promising technology and beef up its pipeline.
Lilly is linking up with South Korea’s ABL Bio, paying $40 million upfront and promising up to roughly $2.56 billion in milestones, in a deal announced Friday. In return for the investment, the pharma will be able to leverage ABL’s Grabody platform to develop multiple bispecific antibodies.
The partners did not specify how many programs the agreement will cover or which targets or indications they plan to prioritize.
ABL’s Grabody platform enables the production of bispecific antibodies that can be designed to seek out target proteins with high specificity. The biotech has adapted this technology to a variety of therapeutic areas: Grabody-B for central nervous system diseases, and Grabody-T and Grabody-I for cancers, which target tumors through the CD137 and PDL1 pathways, respectively.
In April, GSK paid $50 million upfront and pledged up to $2.66 billion in milestones to partner with ABL and use Grabody-B to develop antibody-based therapies that are able to pass through the blood-brain barrier. Like Lilly, however, the British pharma did not disclose what specific diseases it will work on, with Christopher Austin, senior vice president of Research Technologies, saying only that the company will leverage Grabody-B for “neurodegenerative brain diseases,” particularly those associated with aging.
Alongside the licensing agreement, Lilly also made an equity investment in ABL, purchasing 175,079 shares for a total of KRW 22 billion ($15 million).
For Lilly, the ABL deal comes just days after it put $1.2 billion on the line to partner with Boston’s SangeneBio. The deal will allow the pharma to leverage Sangene’s proprietary LEAD technology, which can target RNAi therapies to muscle and fat tissues, as well as to the central nervous system.
In May, Lilly likewise bet $1.3 billion for South Korean biotech Rznomics, looking to leverage the latter’s RNA editing technology for hearing loss. This partnership will complement Lilly’s gene therapy AK-OTOF, which is in testing for a genetic form of hearing loss. In Phase I/II data released in January 2024, the candidate restored the hearing of an 11-year-old boy.
Other deals that Lilly inked this year include its $2.5 billion acquisition of Scorpion Therapeutics’ PI3K inhibitor STX-478 in January and the $1.3 billion takeover of Verve Therapeutics in June.
