For the second time in as many weeks, Eli Lilly is taking out its cheque book to gain access to promising technology and beef up its pipeline.
Lilly is linking up with South Korea’s ABL Bio, paying $40 million upfront and promising up to roughly $2.56 billion in milestones, in a deal announced recently. In return for the investment, the pharma will be able to leverage ABL’s Grabody platform to develop multiple bispecific antibodies.
The partners did not specify how many programs the agreement will cover or which targets or indications they plan to prioritise.
ABL’s Grabody platform enables the production of bispecific antibodies that can be designed to seek out target proteins with high specificity. The biotech has adapted this technology to a variety of therapeutic areas: Grabody-B for central nervous system diseases, and Grabody-T and Grabody-I for cancers, which target tumors through the CD137 and PDL1 pathways, respectively.
In April, GSK paid $50 million upfront and pledged up to $2.66 billion in milestones to partner with ABL and use Grabody-B to develop antibody-based therapies that are able to pass through the blood-brain barrier. Like Lilly, however, the British pharma did not disclose what specific diseases it will work on, with Christopher Austin, senior vice president of Research Technologies, saying only that the company will leverage Grabody-B for ‘neurodegenerative brain diseases’, particularly those associated with aging.
