As Eli Lilly continues to capitalize on its trove of Mounjaro and Zepbound cash with major outside deals, the company’s early external innovation and collaboration arm, Lilly Catalyze360, is welcoming all comers into the fold.
In recent years, Lilly has made major inroads—both internally and externally—into spaces like neurodegeneration, pain, diabetes, obesity and oncology. Beyond those fields, however, “I think all areas are on the table for us,” according to Nisha Nanda, Ph.D., group vice president of business development for Catalyze360 at Lilly.
“We’re pretty prolific out there in the ecosystem, working with small companies outside our therapeutic areas,” Nanda told Fierce in an interview.
Nanda emphasized the importance of “great science” and “excellent platforms” when it comes to Catalzye360’s partnership focus.
“We talk to companies all the time,” she said. “We talk to venture capitalists all the time. We’re open for business with anyone.”
Lilly Catalyze360 was officially unveiled by Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks at this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January.
The program is propped up on three main pillars, Nanda said. Those areas are Lilly Ventures, Lilly Gateway Labs and Lilly ExploR&D.
Gateway Labs provides co-working spaces for researchers that also act like accelerators, while Lilly Ventures aims to serve as an investor and partner for biotechs around the world. ExploR&D, for its part, aims to offer Lilly’s investigational-new-drug-enabling and clinical development firepower for drug developers.
“With Lilly Ventures, we take the opportunities of fun, excellent science,” Nanda said. “We are the limited partner in a bunch of venture firms—and we also do direct investments in companies. We have Lilly Gateway Labs, which is our world class lab space that we have opened in South San Francisco and San Diego … and then we have Lilly ExploR&D, which is deploying Lilly’s R&D capabilities into the biotech ecosystem.”
Nanda added that Lilly Catalyze360 has “many capabilities” that help the pharma work with companies to help them develop new and exciting drugs.
While Lilly already has a standard business development arm for more traditional, corporate partnerships and M&A, Catalyze360 works to enable up-and-coming approaches in development and capture new science to help the Big Pharma stay relevant in the future, Nanda explained.
Gateway Labs operates two sites in South San Francisco and just last week debuted a new $700 million R&D center in the Boston Seaport, which the company aims to use to beef up its RNA and DNA research capabilities.
Earlier this year, Julie Gilmore, Ph.D., Gateway Labs’ global chief, told Fierce that the goal isn’t to establish hundreds of Gateway sites around the world. Rather, the company plans to continue at its current scale and “go to geographies where we think we can make a difference,” she said.
As of May, Gilmore said that roughly 20 companies had leveraged Lilly’s Gateway Labs model, while a similar number of biotechs had signed up for ExploR&D.
Meanwhile, many of Catalyze360’s early collaboration deals have yet to be revealed publicly, Nanda added in her recent interview.
That said, as for the types of deal Catalyze360 is looking at, Nanda pointed to Lilly’s 2022 acquisition of precision genetic medicine company Akouos, which is working on AAV gene therapies for the treatment of inner ear conditions including sensorineural hearing loss.
Lilly and Akouos recently took their hearing loss therapy into the clinic and earlier this year announced positive phase 1/2 results on the candidate AK-OTOF-101, which helped restore hearing within 30 days in a patient who’d struggled with more than a decade of profound hearing loss from birth.