XtalPi inks $250M pact with Lil­ly af­ter Pfiz­er suc­cess

XtalPi is lin­ing up an­oth­er Big Phar­ma col­lab­o­ra­tion fol­low­ing its work with Pfiz­er on Paxlovid and a re­cent tie-up with Janssen. This time the AI and ro­bot­ics biotech is help­ing Eli Lil­ly de­sign new drug can­di­dates for an undis­closed tar­get.

The Shen­zhen-based start­up said Tues­day that the deal could line XtalPi’s cof­fers with $250 mil­lion. The more than 1,000-em­ploy­ee com­pa­ny plans to de­ploy its ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence chops and ro­bot­ics plat­form to “de­liv­er a nov­el com­pound,” which Lil­ly will be re­spon­si­ble for in­ves­ti­gat­ing and de­vel­op­ing com­mer­cial­ly. XtalPi’s small-mol­e­cule drug dis­cov­ery plat­form in­cludes 500 AI mod­els and quan­tum physics al­go­rithms. The biotech was born out of a group of MIT quan­tum physi­cists in 2014.

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