Eli Lilly plans to put roughly $50m into each of the three mirror funds containing up to 20 experimental medicines from different therapeutic areas to speed up this stage of development to three years at an average cost of $10m each, with Eli Lilly then having preferential access, ft.com reported.
The Financial Times quoted Eli Lilly CEO John Lechleiter as saying that the company had finalised one fund that included a potential drug molecule under development by Eli Lilly, another with an external developer, with two more being in development.
The company thinks this is a very different kind of model because it is not limited by its own resources and can increase the number of potential medicines to test against disease ‘targets,’ the business daily reported.
Lechleiter also said that venture capitalists would provide funding, while Eli Lilly’s and external developers’ contribution would come as the value of the experimental drugs.
The idea is to expand the ‘mirror portfolio’ of experimental drugs that Eli Lilly could consider for more expensive, later-stage clinical trials by working with external molecules developed by biotech companies or academic institutions.