With the best-selling medication in the world, tirzepatide, and a record-setting $1 trillion valuation to go with it, Eli Lilly is hardly hurting for cash. But money is only as good as what you spend it on, and the Indianapolis drugmaker has big plans to put its capital to good use: by becoming “a backbone of the overall innovation ecosystem all around the world.”
Such were the words of Jake Van Naarden, president of Lilly Oncology, who spoke with Fierce Biotech alongside Chief Medical Officer David Hyman, M.D., on Dec. 7 at the American Society of Hematology annual meeting in Orlando.
Lilly’s presence at ASH centers on Jaypirca (pirtobrutinib), a BTK inhibitor that was approved in 2023 for mantle cell lymphoma and has since expanded to other leukemias and lymphomas. The Big Pharma is sharing two big phase 3 readouts for the drug at the conference, and Jaypirca features prominently at its booth in the exhibit hall.
But Lilly is not content to stop with Jaypirca, its first major foray into hematology, Van Naarden said. The company’s booth also has a section featuring two new ventures in the world of blood cancer—a molecular glue called LY4584180 and a bispecific T-cell engager dubbed LY4152199. Both are in phase 1 development, but patients haven’t been dosed yet.
“Those are totally different ideas than Jaypirca, and they actually are, in all likelihood, going to address hematologic malignancies having nothing to do with Jaypirca,” Van Naarden explained. Still, the attention-grabbing BTK inhibitor has been a “launching off point” for Lilly in the hematology space.
“Prior to working on this medicine, we had none of these relationships. We didn't know the sites, we didn't know the thought leaders, we didn't know the community doctors. We knew nothing,” the Lilly cancer leader said. Building those relationships with Jaypirca has given Lilly a “network of people that we can go to with new clinical trials” and “people we can learn from,” he added.
“You understand the disease state better when you've worked in it a while, or in that community,” Hyman said. “You have a permission structure to continue to grow in that space, because you understand what the issue set is. You understand the right physicians to go to.”
It’s a model Lilly is also using in breast cancer and is supported by the massive profits being from the tirzepatide franchise in weight loss and diabetes. But while Van Naarden would love to add more assets to Lilly’s hematology pipeline, there’s another limitation standing in the way.
“We are sort of medicine and idea starved more than we are capital starved,” Van Naarden explained. “This is a super hard business. If I can snap my fingers and make great medicine for every horrible disease, I would do it tomorrow. There's a reason why that doesn't happen.”
Innovation is out there, though, he added, and Lilly is taking a global look in its hunt for its next great medicines. China is an obvious place to look; the nation’s biotech sector has been growing rapidly, much to the chagrin of some in the U.S. industry, who see the emerging rival as a threat. A federal commission warned in November that the U.S. is losing its innovative biotech edge to China.
“We've definitely ramped up our looking in China,” Van Naarden said. Chinese assets aren’t always superior to those from North America or Europe, but sometimes come with early clinical data and a lower price point.
“They're just in the same pool with everything else that Lilly is evaluating," he said. “That's definitely a newer behavior.”
But Lilly isn’t content to use its wealth just to scoop up promising assets. The pharma giant also wants to support the invention of those assets in the first place by investing in emerging biotech companies and biotech-focused venture capital firms. The company is also building a network of incubators called Lilly Gateway Labs, which are meant to support fledgling biotechs.
“We're trying to put them in major hubs of innovation,” Van Naarden said, including San Francisco, Boston, San Diego, Philadelphia, and yes, China. Lilly has launched two locations in China so far, one in Beijing and another in Shanghai. The company is currently reconsidering plans to open a hub in London.
Tenants in these labs don’t pledge any future assets to Lilly, Van Naarden said. “What we get out of it is a closer relationship as their science breaks.”
Investments and incubators are all about supporting groundbreaking science early on, and Lilly is even considering ways to help academic scientists who have lost funding during the Trump administration, with a focus on academic medical centers.
“Those are conversations we've been having for the past couple months with academic medical centers all around the country,” Van Naarden said. “Pharmaceutical-sponsored clinical research is the lifeblood of our business.”