Gate News message, April 29 — US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced on April 28 it signed a deal worth up to $2.25 billion with AI biotech startup Profluent to develop DNA-editing medicines. Lilly will receive exclusive rights to any medicines resulting from the partnership.
The companies did not disclose the upfront payment or specific disease targets. The collaboration centers on AI-designed proteins called recombinases, which can insert large DNA segments (kilobase-scale) at precise locations in a cell’s genome, potentially advancing beyond existing tools such as CRISPR/Cas9.
The agreement aligns with Lilly’s broader investment in AI-driven drug discovery, where no AI-designed medicine has yet received US regulatory approval, though numerous candidates are in clinical trials. In January, Lilly signed a separate $1.12 billion collaboration with Seamless Therapeutics to develop recombinase-based treatments for hearing loss.
Profluent is also expanding access to its technology through open-source channels. The startup released OpenCRISPR-1, described as the world’s first open-source, AI-generated gene editor available for licensed research and commercial use. In human cell tests, OpenCRISPR-1 achieved editing efficiency comparable to SpCas9, a widely used CRISPR enzyme, while reducing unintended edits elsewhere in the genome by 95%.
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