Eli Lilly has committed $100 million in upfront and near-term payments to InnoCare Pharma to form a five-target drug discovery pact. The deal features up to $3.25 billion in potential milestones down the line.
The partners have yet to share details of the deal’s targets or therapeutic areas, only saying that the programs address critical unmet medical needs. Beijing-based InnoCare will apply its drug discovery platform and research experience to the targets in return for upfront and near-term fees, development and commercial milestones and single-digit tiered royalties based on annual net product sales.
Partnering with InnoCare extends Lilly’s deal spree. Flush with GLP-1 cash, the drugmaker has hoovered up assets this year, striking a series of takeovers worth upward of $1 billion each while securing other R&D programs and technologies through licensing deals.
InnoCare CEO Jasmine Cui, Ph.D., discussed her own company’s approach to partnering on an earnings call last month. Reminded by an analyst that InnoCare went into 2026 targeting deals, Cui outlined business development activities the company had undertaken in the U.S. for early- and late-stage programs, such as its VAV1 degrader and TYK2 inhibitor, respectively.
But Cui said at the time that she was in no rush to partner the programs.
“We have a lot of cash, and we have our strategy for globalization, and we choose our partners very carefully,” Cui said on the August earnings call. “We are not urgent to get the cash.”
InnoCare’s VAV1 degrader and TYK2 inhibitor are part of an internal pipeline spanning hemato-oncology, autoimmune diseases and solid tumors. InnoCare’s work on the autoimmune target TYK2 has recently made headlines as the biopharma has emerged as a rival to Bristol Myers Squibb and Takeda.
The company’s autoimmune pipeline also includes orelabrutinib, a BTK inhibitor that is already approved in China in certain blood cancers. Biogen paid $125 million for the asset in 2021, only to walk away from the deal 19 months later amid intensifying concerns about the safety of BTK inhibitors in indications such as multiple sclerosis. InnoCare continued to study the asset and landed a deal with Zenas BioPharma.
While the TYK2 and BTK programs are both small-molecule kinase inhibitors, InnoCare’s pipeline extends to other modalities. The biotech’s solid tumor team is moving several antibody-drug conjugates through early development, while the autoimmune unit recently took the VAV1 degrader into the clinic. InnoCare and KeyMed Biosciences sold international rights to a bispecific antibody last year.