Eli Lilly Joins Race to Develop Coronavirus Treatment
Eli Lilly Joins Race to Develop Coronavirus Treatment
(Bloomberg) -- Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. has entered an agreement to develop an experimental therapy for the new coronavirus with with closely held biotechnology company AbCellera Biologics Inc.
The Vancouver based biotechnology firm is already working on discovering antibodies that could potentially be deployed to stop transmission of the virus and prevent the lung illness known as Covid-19.
The co-development agreement was announced by the companies in a statement Thursday afternoon. Bloomberg reported on the agreement earlier in the day.
A spokeswoman for Indianapolis-based Lilly declined to comment on the financial details of the transaction
Through the partnership, Eli Lilly will join a group of drugmakers that are racing the clock to develop treatments and vaccines for the virus, which has infected more than 127,000 people and killed more than 4,700 worldwide. No drugs or vaccines have yet been approved.
A roundtable of pharmaceutical executives told U.S. President Donald Trump this month that antiviral medications could be available for patients in a matter of months. Vaccines, which would prevent healthy people from contracting the disease, are further from reaching doctors’ offices and pharmacy shelves. Gilead Sciences Inc. and AbbVie Inc. have emerged as front-runners for potential treatments for the disease, while Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna Inc. are developing vaccines. No executives from Lilly attended the White House meeting.
Lilly’s success in fighting the novel coronavirus will be dependent on AbCellera, which has developed propriety technology that quickly screens for potent antibodies and validates potential candidates on tight timelines. The discovery company touts its ability to “fast-track” drug programs for its many partners, which have included major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer Inc., Merck & Co. and Sanofi.
AbCellera is no stranger to pandemic response. In 2018, the company was awarded a contract from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, for as much as $30 million in funding to create an end-to-end platform for rapid pandemic response. The contract was a part of a broader Defense Department initiative known as the Pandemic Prevention Platform program, which was intended to encourage development of “field-ready medical countermeasures within 60 days of isolation of a viral pathogen.”
AbCellera has said its pandemic response platform had already been “pressure tested” in a simulation in late 2018 against a distant relative of Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome coronavirus, or MERS-CoV, demonstrating that the platform could “effectively isolate hundreds of coronavirus-neutralizing antibodies” from camels and related animals in less than four days.
“We have been preparing for exactly this scenario and we are ready to tackle this threat,” AbCellera head of R&D Ester Falconer said in a statement on Jan. 28, when the company announced it would be working on a therapeutic to control transmission of the novel coronavirus. The biotech has also partnered with researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Vaccine Research Center to test antibody candidates as a part of its coronavirus efforts.
To contact the reporter on this story: Riley Griffin in New York at rgriffin42@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Drew Armstrong at darmstrong17@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth Fournier, Timothy Annett
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