A Stan­ford biotech rubbed el­bows with Genen­tech in 2020, reach­ing a deal with the big-name biotech just over 18 months ago. And now, the AI out­fit is in its sec­ond part­ner­ship with Big Phar­ma.

Gen­e­sis Ther­a­peu­tics se­cured a deal with big phar­ma Eli Lil­ly, the com­pa­ny an­nounced on Tues­day — to dis­cov­er ther­a­pies “across a range of ther­a­peu­tic ar­eas,” ac­cord­ing to a state­ment put out by the biotech.

Found­ed in 2019 as a spin­out out of Vi­jay Pande’s lab at Stan­ford, Gen­e­sis Ther­a­peu­tics looked to join the in­dus­try-wide push at the time to in­cor­po­rate AI in­to drug R&D. The biotech ini­tial­ly bagged $4.1 mil­lion in seed fund­ing, led by An­dreessen Horowitz. And in the mean­time, it’s got a big name be­hind it as di­rec­tor of the board: for­mer Alex­ion CEO and founder Leonard Bell.

It fur­ther spread its wings af­ter the biotech inked a deal with Genen­tech in 2020 — Roche’s glob­al head of phar­ma part­ner­ing James Sabry said at the time that “AI can help un­lock the next gen­er­a­tion of in­no­v­a­tive ther­a­pies for pa­tients in need of ad­di­tion­al op­tions. We are ex­cit­ed to work with Gen­e­sis’ team to dis­cov­er med­i­cines cur­rent­ly out of reach us­ing con­ven­tion­al meth­ods.” Two months lat­er, it scored $52 mil­lion via a Se­ries A round.

Now on­to the de­tails: the biotech will be us­ing their AI-based drug dis­cov­ery plat­form, which in­cludes ar­ti­fi­cial neur­al net­works and ma­chine learn­ing mod­els to iso­late and pin­point drug can­di­dates for a va­ri­ety of se­vere dis­eases — which so far re­main un­named. Gen­e­sis is able to make “ul­tra-fast and ac­cu­rate pre­dic­tions” of a com­pound’s po­ten­cy, se­lec­tiv­i­ty, tox­i­c­i­ty and more, CEO Evan Fein­berg told End­points News two years ago on the heels of the Genen­tech deal be­ing an­nounced. As far as fi­nan­cials go, Gen­e­sis will get $20 mil­lion up­front for work on three ini­tial tar­gets. Lil­ly will re­tain the op­tion to add two more tar­gets to Gen­e­sis’s plate, and Gen­e­sis is el­i­gi­ble to re­ceive up to $670 mil­lion over­all in com­bined up­front + mile­stone pay­ments, plus po­ten­tial roy­al­ties.

“We are ex­cit­ed to join forces with Lil­ly and their world-class re­search and de­vel­op­ment teams to dis­cov­er nov­el drugs for pa­tients suf­fer­ing with se­vere dis­eases,” Fein­berg said in a state­ment.

It was great getting back to a live ESMO conference/webinar in Paris followed by a live pop-up event for the Endpoints 11 in Boston. We’re staying on the road in October with our return for a live/streaming EUBIO22 in London.

Silicon Valley Bank’s Nooman Haque and I are once again jumping back into the thick of it with a slate of virtual and live events on October 12. I’ll get the ball rolling with a virtual fireside chat with Novo Nordisk R&D chief Marcus Schindler, covering their pipeline plans and BD work.

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel made clear on the last quarterly call that “now is not the time to slow down.” On Thursday, he made a bit more room in the cockpit.

The company unveiled a new executive role on Thursday, promoting former chief technical operations and quality officer Juan Andres to president of strategic partnerships and enterprise expansion, and poaching a former Novartis exec to take his place.

Gilead is mounting its counterfeit drug lawsuit, naming two “kingpins” and a complex network of conspirators who allegedly sold imitation bottles of its HIV meds, some of which ended up in US pharmacies.

The pharma giant on Wednesday provided an update on what it called a “large-scale, sophisticated counterfeiting conspiracy,” accusing two new defendants of “leading and orchestrating” a scheme to sell hundreds of millions of dollars in illegitimate drugs posing as meds such as Biktarvy and Descovy.

The US government is all set to buy $10.7 million worth of Siga Technologies’ monkeypox oral antiviral, the company announced Thursday.

Of the total doses, $5.1 million worth of oral antivirals called Tpoxx (tecovirimat) will be delivered this year, with the US Department of Defense having the option of buying the rest at a later point.

The new contract follows an earlier one in which the government had purchased $7.4 million worth of Tpoxx from the company.