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.

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.

As talk of AI this-and-that gobbles up headline after headline, one Big Pharma is losing its AI leader as she transitions to another drug giant: Iya Khalil will trade in her hat as Novartis’ go-to expert and leader in the space for Merck as VP and head of data, AI and genome sciences next week.

After nearly three years leading the artificial intelligence team at Novartis — as Big Pharma and biotechs alike latch onto the ripening AI-for-drug-discovery mode of operation — Khalil will switch employers to head up a similar post at Merck, where she’ll work out of Cambridge, MA beginning Feb. 13, the company tells Endpoints News.

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.”