Seed Therapeutics blooms on collaboration with Lilly

Seed Therapeutics, a BeyondSpring (Nasdaq: BYSI) spin-off focused on discovering and developing “molecular glues” to degrade disease-causing protein previously believed to be undruggable, has entered into a research collaboration and license agreement with Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) to discover and develop new chemical entities (NCEs) that could produce therapeutic benefit through targeted protein degradation (TPD).

The TPD field allows for the targeting of hundreds of proteins that are known to be associated with human diseases but were previously thought to be undruggable. Seed Therapeutics has pioneered a strategy called “molecular glue” to induce the protein degrading machinery which is present in all cells to recognize and degrade the disease-causing protein that is not normally targeted for elimination. More importantly, Seed Therapeutics’ molecular glue program focuses on NCEs with more drug-like chemical properties, differentiated from the strategy of developing proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs).

Financial consideration of up to $800 million