Lilly, METiS in AI drug delivery pact worth up to US$1.1 billion

The Lilly-METiS pact fits a pattern of Lilly reaching for external AI capabilities rather than building everything in-house. Earlier this year Lilly signed a larger AI deal with another Hong Kong-listed company, Insilico Medicine, securing an exclusive worldwide license to develop, manufacture and commercialize novel oral therapeutics in preclinical development for certain indications, alongside multiple R&D programs on targets Lilly selects using Insilico's Pharma.AI platforms. Lilly's Andrew Adams described Insilico's AI-enabled discovery capabilities as a complement to Lilly's clinical-development expertise.

Lilly has also invested in its own AI computing infrastructure. NVIDIA said in October 2025 that Lilly was deploying a DGX SuperPOD with DGX B300 systems built with 1,016 Blackwell Ultra GPUs, which NVIDIA described as the largest, most powerful AI factory wholly owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company. Lilly will use the system to train large-scale biomedical foundation and frontier models, and select models will go on Lilly TuneLab, a platform giving biotech companies access to drug discovery models built on US$1 billion worth of Lilly's proprietary data.

Against that backdrop, the METiS deal is narrower in scope — focused specifically on lipid nanoparticle design via METiS' AiLNP platform — but the milestone structure of up to US$1.1 billion signals how much Lilly is willing to pay for delivery technologies that could improve tissue specificity. METiS CEO Chris Lai framed delivery as a critical determinant of therapeutic success as the industry expands into more sophisticated modalities, a rationale that appears to sit behind Lilly's willingness to sign multiple AI-focused partnerships across discovery and delivery.