The Insilico Medicine agreement plays into Eli Lilly’s recent AI push, anchored by a partnership last year with NVIDIA to build a supercomputer to optimize drug discovery and shorten the development timeline.
In a deal that expands the pharma’s AI capabilities, Eli Lilly is fronting $115 million to deepen its partnership with Insilico Medicine and use the biotech’s machine learning platforms for oral drugs against a variety of diseases.
Under the terms of the agreement, announced in a March 29 release, Lilly will also be on the hook for development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments. The partners did not provide a specific breakdown of these contingent commitments, only noting that they bring the total deal value up to $2.75 billion. Insilico would also be entitled to tiered royalties on future product sales.
In return for its investment, Lilly will get an exclusive worldwide license to develop, manufacture and commercialize a host of oral drugs “for certain indications”—the companies did not disclose what diseases they plan to target, only saying they will work across multiple therapeutic areas. The assets are in preclinical development.
Lilly and Insilico will also collaborate on multiple R&D programs centered on targets of the pharma’s choosing and leveraging the biotech’s AI platforms.
With its AI-enabled engine, Insilico is “a powerful complement to Lilly’s deep expertise in clinical development,” Andrew Adams, group vice president of Molecule Discovery at Lilly, said in a prepared statement. The pharma in November 2025 likewise linked up with Insilico to generate, design and optimize drug candidates for similarly undisclosed targets. Financial details of that deal were sparse: Insilico could receive up to $100 million in upfront and milestone payments, with royalties on top of those.
Partnering with Insilico, Adams added on Sunday, “allows us to explore novel mechanisms and accelerate the identification of promising therapeutic candidates.”
The Insilico deals are part of a broader AI push by Lilly. In October 2025, the pharma partnered with NVIDIA—one of the frontrunners of the current AI surge—to build a supercomputer that would be able to synthesize findings from millions of experiments to optimize drug discovery, while also shortening development cycles, the pharma said at the time.
“Lilly is shifting from using AI as a tool to embracing it as a scientific collaborator,” Thomas Fuchs, chief AI officer, said in a statement about the NVIDIA deal.
For Insilico, Lilly represents the latest stop in a recent dealmaking tour, including neuro-focused partnerships with Hygtia Therapeutics and Tenacia Biotechnology, a cardiometabolic collaboration with Qilu Pharmaceutical and an oncology agreement with Servier.
