Lilly to pay Fauna Bio up to $494 million to hunt obesity targets using hibernation biology

Eli Lilly has signed a multi-year agreement with Fauna Bio, a biotechnology company based in Emeryville, California, to use Fauna's artificial intelligence platform to search for new obesity drug targets, the two companies announced Dec. 21, 2023 ^[1]. Fauna Bio will receive an upfront payment that includes an equity investment and is eligible for up to $494 million in preclinical, clinical and commercial milestone payments, plus royalties on any product sales ^[1].

The work is preclinical, meaning it happens before any experimental compound is tested in people ^[1]. The two teams will collaborate to identify multiple drug targets for obesity ^[1]. The announcement does not name which Lilly medicines or programs the collaboration is meant to support ^[1].

Fauna Bio's approach starts with animals that survive conditions that would be lethal to humans ^[1]. Its Convergence platform analyzes data from the protective adaptations of hibernation and other extreme adaptations to find genes worth targeting in human disease, according to the company ^[1]. Fauna says the platform draws on genomic analyses across 452 mammal species, including 65 hibernators ^[1]. Its main discovery biobank holds more than 22 tissue types collected at 13 precise physiological time points from the 13-lined ground squirrel, along with samples from tenrecs and spiny mice ^[1]. In total, Fauna reports thousands of transcriptomes, proteomes and epigenomes and more than 22 billion sequence reads ^[1]. Target selection runs on a custom graph neural network with more than 980 million model parameters ^[1].

A video released with the announcement shows a 13-lined ground squirrel rewarming from 15 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit) to 25 C (77 F) over 35 minutes as it comes out of hibernation ^[1].

"We are very excited to enter into this collaboration with Lilly, which showcases the power of our Convergence AI platform to rapidly identify novel targets for complex disease areas of high unmet need," said Ashley Zehnder, CEO and co-founder of Fauna Bio ^[1].

Ruth Gimeno, group vice president for diabetes, obesity and cardiometabolic research at Lilly, said in the same announcement: "Fauna Bio brings a unique approach to the discovery of novel targets for obesity. We look forward to working with the Fauna Bio team to realize the value of their platform and discover more effective treatments for patients with obesity." ^[1]

Endpoints News reported the same day that Lilly already has multiple obesity drug candidates in mid- and late-stage clinical development ^[2].

Why it matters for patients

This is discovery work on drug targets, not a test of a medicine in people ^[1]. Nothing in the announcement changes any medicine that is already approved or in late-stage testing; the collaboration sits upstream of human studies ^[1].

If the collaboration produces targets, they could support more than one kind of treatment — Fauna says its platform can identify genes to target across a broad range of treatment modalities ^[1]. Which biological mechanisms are involved, whether the focus extends beyond obesity, and whether an eventual product would be a pill or an injection have not been disclosed ^[1].

The number of targets the companies expect to find, the timeline, and how the $494 million in milestone payments is divided among preclinical, clinical and commercial stages also have not been disclosed ^[1]. Payments tied to clinical and commercial milestones would only be made if programs advance that far ^[1].

What happens next

The agreement is described as multi-year, and no completion date or schedule of milestones was given ^[1]. Whether Fauna Bio has already identified any candidate targets for Lilly, and when Lilly might begin testing them, has not been reported ^[1].