Can a with­drawn Eli Lil­ly drug find sec­ond life in ra­dio­phar­ma? Lit­tle biotech hands over $5M cash to find out

Three years af­ter Eli Lil­ly pulled Lartru­vo from the mar­ket, the soft tis­sue sar­co­ma drug is get­ting a sec­ond life.

Lit­tle Aus­tralia-list­ed biotech Telix Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals has nabbed an ex­clu­sive li­cense to de­vel­op ra­di­o­la­beled forms of the an­ti­body, al­so known as olara­tum­ab. It will ini­tial­ly go af­ter the same in­di­ca­tion of soft tis­sue sar­co­ma.

Lil­ly is grab­bing an up­front pay­ment of $5 mil­lion — mi­nus­cule by Big Phar­ma stan­dards — and will be el­i­gi­ble for up to $225 mil­lion in mile­stones, but the big­ger re­ward may come in the form of a com­pan­ion di­ag­nos­tic, to be de­vel­oped by Telix. If Lil­ly choos­es to ex­er­cise its op­tion to li­cense the di­ag­nos­tic, it will pay Telix $5 mil­lion.

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