Eli Lilly is again dipping into the buzzy area of radiopharmaceuticals by way of private biotech Aktis Oncology.
The pharma giant will dish out $60 million upfront and make an undisclosed equity investment in the Boston biotech, the companies said Tuesday morning. Lilly could pay up to $1.1 billion in biobucks and tiered royalties.
The pact with Aktis spans both solid tumor radiopharmaceutical medicines and diagnostics. Lilly will choose the targets and drive the global clinical development, the companies said.
The executive team at Lilly is familiar with the space. Chief scientific officer Dan Skovronsky came to the pharma company from a radiopharmaceuticals deal: The drugmaker bought Avid Radiopharmaceuticals, where Skovronsky was CEO, in 2010.
The Aktis collaboration arrives as Lilly digests its $1.4 billion acquisition of Point Biopharma last fall, which serves as the foundation for a burgeoning piece of the oncology pipeline at the world’s largest pharma by market capitalization.
Jacob Van Naarden“We’re really excited about bringing radiopharmaceuticals into the portfolio by way of the acquisition of Point Biopharma, and we are supplementing that acquisition with additional work through our discovery labs and the ability to make these medicines ourselves,” Lilly Oncology president Jacob Van Naarden said during Lilly’s first-quarter earnings call last month. “So I expect we’ll have more to talk about in terms of additional medicines over the course of the next couple years.”
Aktis, meanwhile, is quite familiar with leading names in the industry. Aside from venture capital firms, it also has the backing of three marquee pharma companies: Novartis, Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck.
They’ve all bet on Aktis’ mini-protein discovery platform and actinium approach. The biotech has also shored up supply of radioisotopes, or decaying atoms that are key to targeted radiation. The startup was born out of MPM Capital and emerged with $72 million in March 2021. It returned with $84 million in August 2022.
The biotech’s seven in-house programs are not involved in the Lilly deal, it said. Its lead project goes after Nectin-4, an antigen found in urothelial cancers, among others. Aktis plans to use alpha radiotherapy for other cancers, including breast, lung, colorectal, bladder and liver, according to its website.
“We think this modality has plenty of applicability beyond neuroendocrine tumors and prostate cancer, which is where the two commercial products today sit,” Van Naarden said in a fireside chat with Endpoints News ahead of last year’s European Society for Medical Oncology confab.
Radiopharmaceuticals have grown in popularity in drug and diagnostics R&D in recent years, leading to a higher volume of dealmaking. Earlier this month, the field’s leader, Novartis, made a $1 billion upfront bet on Mariana Oncology just days after boosting its discovery work with PeptiDream. Other large drugmakers have also bought their way into the space, including Bristol Myers and AstraZeneca.