Eli Lil­ly will li­cense in Re­gor Ther­a­peu­tics ther­a­pies for meta­bol­ic dis­or­ders, as a part of an agree­ment an­nounced Fri­day that will give the Chi­nese biotech an up­front pay­ment of up to $50 mil­lion, part of which is an eq­ui­ty in­vest­ment.

In a vague­ly word­ed re­lease, Lil­ly said it has a li­cense for cer­tain Re­gor “in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty” and will have an op­tion to ex­tend that li­cense. In ex­change, Lil­ly will over­see glob­al clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment and com­mer­cial­iza­tion for any ther­a­pies, with the ex­cep­tion of Chi­na, Macau, Hong Kong and Tai­wan. Re­gor, a Shang­hai-based com­pa­ny, will re­serve the rights to these re­gions.

The com­pa­ny is el­i­gi­ble for up to $1.5 bil­lion in po­ten­tial pay­ments based on pre­clin­i­cal, clin­i­cal and com­mer­cial mile­stones, as well as tiered roy­al­ties from sales.

Re­gor CEO Xi­ayang Qiu said that the col­lab­o­ra­tion is, in part, a recog­ni­tion of Re­gor’s core tech­nol­o­gy, the Com­put­er Ac­cel­er­at­ed Ra­tio­nal Dis­cov­ery plat­form. CARD, an­oth­er in a long line of fan­ci­ly named biotech com­pu­ta­tion­al plat­forms, is de­signed to cre­ate a more ef­fi­cient process for the dis­cov­ery of new drugs.

Min Zhong

Through CARD, the team has ad­vanced a num­ber of prod­ucts in its pipeline in just two years, in­clud­ing RGT-587 for on­col­o­gy, which is set to en­ter Phase I tri­als, and and RGT-075 to tar­get a glucagon-like pep­tide 1 re­cep­tor hor­mone, which stim­u­lates glu­cose-in­duced in­sulin se­cre­tion. That can­di­date is en­ter­ing Phase II/III tri­als.

Wenge Zhong

The com­pa­ny was found­ed in 2018 by a team that in­cludes two Pfiz­er vet­er­ans and three — Qiu and Min Zhong, and CTO Wenge Zhong — who used to work for Am­gen’s Chi­nese R&D op­er­a­tions. Re­gor’s fo­cus so far has been on on­col­o­gy, meta­bol­ic dis­eases and au­toim­mune dis­eases.

“Re­gor’s tech­nol­o­gy will al­so al­low Lil­ly to fur­ther ac­cel­er­ate in­no­va­tion and de­liv­er break­through ther­a­pies in obe­si­ty and di­a­betes,” Ruth Gi­meno, the VP of di­a­betes re­search at Lil­ly, said in a state­ment.

Ruth Gi­meno

In Feb­ru­ary, Lil­ly Asia Ven­tures led the Se­ries B fundrais­ing round, in which the com­pa­ny raised $90 mil­lion to back their clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment. It al­so land­ed an in­vest­ment from Loy­al Val­ley Cap­i­tal, a com­pa­ny that played a role in fi­nanc­ing the so­cial me­dia video app Tik­Tok, and was list­ed as a top-10 in­flu­en­tial pri­vate eq­ui­ty firm in Chi­na.

“To­geth­er we are work­ing hard for a bet­ter world by in­no­v­a­tive and trans­for­ma­tive med­i­cines which make mean­ing­ful im­pacts to pa­tients glob­al­ly,” Loy­al Val­ley founder Andy Lin said in a state­ment at the time.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”