
After investing in their Series B, Lilly bags a license for a batch of metabolic candidates
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.

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.

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.

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.