The collaboration focuses on ‘molecular gates,’ a class of molecules that the startup company Gate Bioscience says can stop pathogenic proteins from leaving the cell.
Eli Lilly is partnering with the Bay Area–based Gate Bioscience in a deal worth up to $856 million to develop a new class of therapeutic molecules.
The deal, announced Thursday afternoon, has Lilly paying an unspecified upfront sum and an equity investment, along with development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments, along with tiered royalties on global sales.
The announcement did not detail specific molecular targets or disease areas, only stating that the companies would identify “difficult-to-drug proteins” in “diseases of high unmet medical need.”
The deal centers around what Gate calls “molecular gates,” small molecule therapeutics that selectively block the passage of disease-causing proteins through the endoplasmic reticulum, an organelle required for building proteins, before they can be secreted from the cell and potentially cause disease.
Gate touts this approach as being amenable to delivering drugs orally and able to cross the blood-brain barrier to treat brain diseases. The company was founded in 2021 and emerged from stealth in 2023 with $60 million in funding from Versant Ventures, a16z Bio + Health and a handful of other backers. The company doesn’t have a published pipeline and the pact with Lilly is the company’s first announced partnership.
Like a lot of Big Pharmas of late, Lilly has been busy signing bolt-on deals and collaborations to bolster its pipeline. In June alone, Lilly signed a deal to pay up to $870 million to Camurus to create long-acting obesity drugs, then a week later signed a partnership worth a potential $650 million with Juvena to find muscle preserving drugs to pair with obesity therapies that oftentimes cause patients to lose muscle mass in unwanted ways.
A week after those two deals, Lilly paid $1.3 billion to acquire the gene editing company Verve Therapeutics. That deal revolves around VERVE-102, a therapy for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, where a contingent value right would pay out to Verve shareholders once the first patient is dosed with the drug.
