Insilico Medicine signs up to $2.5 billion neuroimmune-drug deal with SK Biopharmaceuticals

Insilico Medicine signed a partnership agreement with SK Biopharmaceuticals to develop new drugs for neuroimmune conditions in a deal valued at more than $2.5 billion, Fortune reported. Insilico will use its Pharma.AI platform to design new candidates. SK Biopharmaceuticals will handle late-stage development and commercialization.

Insilico is expected to receive $18 million in near-term payments, with the potential to reach up to $2.5 billion if development and commercial milestones are met, plus royalties. The agreement is Insilico’s largest tie-up to date with an Asia-Pacific partner and its second deal of this size with a major pharmaceutical company.

In late March, Insilico signed a $2.75 billion agreement with Eli Lilly targeting best-in-class novel oral therapeutics in preclinical development.

Insilico Medicine’s shares rose 5.6 percent in Hong Kong trading on Monday after the announcement at midday local time. The shares have risen 35 percent since the company’s IPO in late December. SK Biopharmaceuticals’s shares fell 1.7 percent on Monday and have declined 30 percent for the year.

“We want to be the SpaceX of the pharmaceutical industry,” Alex Zhavoronkov, co-CEO of Insilico Medicine, told Fortune. “The more I scale, the better my AI gets. ” “By combining Insilico’s AI-powered drug discovery platform with SK Biopharmaceuticals’ clinical development and U.S.

Commercialization capabilities, we believe we can accelerate the discovery of innovative CNS therapies for patients,” Donghoon Lee, president and CEO of SK Biopharmaceuticals, said in a statement. SK Biopharmaceuticals is part of Korea’s SK Group. On Monday, SK Hynix, another SK Group company, became South Korea’s most valuable company by overtaking Samsung Electronics.