Eli Lilly has returned to Nimbus Therapeutics for another metabolic collaboration, this time focused on the red-hot R&D space of oral obesity therapies.
The latest partnership will see Lilly pass Nimbus up to $55 million in upfront and near-term milestone payments to use the biotech’s computational chemistry and structure-based drug design approach to work on a new oral treatment for obesity and other metabolic diseases.
Further down the line, Nimbus could potentially receive up to $1.3 billion in development, commercial and sales milestone payments as well as tiered royalties on global net sales should the oral drug make it to market.
Oral obesity drugs are one of the hottest tickets in biopharma R&D, with Novo Nordisk having just launched an oral version of its blockbuster weight loss drug Wegovy. Lilly has been working hard to secure FDA approval of its own oral obesity candidate, orforglipron.
This morning’s announcement follows a 2022 deal worth up to $496 million in biobucks, in which Lilly charged Nimbus with discovering new targeted therapies that activate a specific isoform of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) for metabolic diseases using its computational drug discovery engine and structure-based drug design.
“We are pleased to deepen our collaboration with Nimbus, a team that has demonstrated exceptional ability to tackle complex drug discovery challenges,” Lilly's Ruth Gimeno, group vice president, diabetes and metabolic research and development, said in today’s release.
“Working together to develop this novel obesity therapy represents an important addition to Lilly's efforts to advance innovative treatment options for patients with metabolic disorders,” Gimeno added.
Nimbus describes its research approach as bringing together computational scientists, medicinal chemists, pharmacologists and translational biologists to “integrate AI-driven predictive models with structure-based design to develop novel small molecules with best-in-class potential.”
Peter Tummino, Ph.D., president of R&D at Nimbus, commented that the company was “excited to collaborate with Lilly on another program, combining our discovery capabilities with their metabolic disease expertise to bring a much-needed new treatment to people with obesity and make a meaningful difference in their lives.”
Lilly isn’t the only pharma to see potential in Nimbus’ approach. Takeda turned heads at the tail-end of 2022 when it announced a $4 billion acquisition of Nimbus Therapeutics’ tyrosine kinase 2 med, now known as zasocitinib.