Eli Lilly and the Haisco Pharmaceutical Group have yet to disclose what specific indications they plan to prioritize.
Eli Lilly has fronted $87 million to partner with Beijing-based Haisco Pharmaceutical Group to collaborate on a clutch of early-stage assets across multiple indications.
Under the terms of the agreement, announced Monday, the Indianapolis pharma will be on the hook for up to $2.97 billion in milestone payments. All told, the deal could reach up to $3.05 billion in value, plus single-digit tiered royalties on future product sales.
Lilly and Haisco will work on five programs, though the partners haven’t yet disclosed what disease areas or therapeutic targets they plan to go after. Some of these assets will exclusively belong to Lilly across worldwide markets, while others will still be Haisco’s in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
Across all programs, Haisco will take charge of discovery and identification work before Lilly takes over and conducts studies to enable investigational new drug applications for the partnered assets. The pharma will also be responsible for clinical development, regulatory activities and commercialization.
The Haisco agreement wraps up Lilly’s productive shopping trip to Asia on Monday. Earlier that day, the GLP-1 giant linked up with South Korea’s Hanmi Pharm, putting up to $1.2 billion on the line for a mid-stage GLP-2 agonist currently being tested for short bowel syndrome.
Before this week’s pair of deals, Lilly had been assembling a long list of partners to puts its GLP-1 gains to productive use. This year, the company has so far pumped at least $29 billion in biobucks into business development activities, much of which has gone into acquisitions and alliances. Just last week, for instance, Lilly absorbed a trio of vaccine developers, dropping $3.8 billion to buff up its infectious diseases pipeline—and giving former FDA regulator Peter Marks a new sandbox to play in.
Lilly in April also made a massive $7 billion play to swallow Kelonia Therapeutics and its platform for in vivo gene delivery. That agreement is expected to support Lilly’s foray into the CAR T arena, alongside the $2.4 billion acquisition of Orna Therapeutics in February, which gave the pharma a preclinical pipeline of in vivo cell therapies.
