Insillico Medicine and SK Biopharmaceuticals have teamed up on an AI-enabled search for drug candidates targeting neuroimmune disorders.
The value of the deal could potentially exceed $2.5 billion, making it the largest transaction Insilico has secured with a fellow Asia-Pacific company to date. But its terms adopt a heavily backloaded structure, with only $18 million in upfront and near-term milestone payments.
The alliance targets conditions affecting the central nervous system, a key focus area of SK Biopharm. The two firms will develop drugs for neuroinflammatory, neurodegenerative and rare neurological disorders, although the specific diseases were not disclosed.
Under the agreement, Insilico will leverage its Pharma.AI engine to design and optimize drug candidates, while SK will steer late-stage development and commercialization, utilizing the infrastructure it has built through its epilepsy therapy, Xcopri (cenobamate).
“This collaboration represents an important milestone in expanding our growth beyond epilepsy into new CNS therapeutic areas,” Donghoon Lee, president and CEO of SK Biopharmaceuticals, said in a June 22 statement. “Beyond a single program, we see this collaboration as a scalable and repeatable growth platform that can be leveraged for future target discovery and development opportunities.”
By combining the two firms’ capabilities, “we aim to unlock breakthrough therapies, spanning both traditional small molecules and advanced new modalities, to address critical patient needs,” Alex Zhavoronkov, Ph.D., co-CO and chief business officer of Insilico, said in a statement.
The SK Biopharm partnership continues a dealmaking streak for Insilico following its Hong Kong IPO at the end of 2025. In CNS alone, the company in January penned an agreement with Fosun Pharma’s Hygtia Therapeutics to split rights on a brain-penetrant NLRP3 inhibitor initially for Parkinson’s disease.
In March, the AI drug discovery specialist also expanded a deal originally signed a year ago with China’s Tenacia Biotechnology to include an additional asset “with defined properties for challenging neurological diseases.”
Beyond CNS, Insilico in March landed a major pact with Eli Lilly worth up to $2.75 billion. Under that project, Lilly paid $115 million upfront to secure exclusive worldwide licenses for certain preclinical oral therapeutics developed with insilico’s platform for undisclosed indications.
The Hong Kong-headquartered company has recently also signed a potential $888 million deal with Servier focused on cancer and an up-to-$120 million partnership with Qilu Pharmaceutical targeting cardiometabolic diseases.
As for SK Biopharmaceuticals, the Insilico collaboration fits in the Korean company’s broader ambition in digital health and AI technologies, as manifested in the slogan, “SK, AI for Every Patient,” to be presented at its booth at the BIO 2026 International Convention, according to the Asia Business Daily.
The latest deal follows SK Biopharm’s October 2025 launch of Mentis Care, an AI-driven digital health joint venture forged with Eurofarma to commercialize an AI-based epilepsy management platform. The platform combines AI-driven real-time seizure detection and prediction algorithms with clinical decision support tools to personalize patient care.
At last year’s BIO convention, the Korean company unveiled a memorandum of understanding (PDF) with an AI company called PhnyX Lab to develop customized solutions powered by the latter’s generative AI platform, Cheiron. The goal is to streamline drug development processes with an initial focus on automating tasks required for clinical trial initiation.