Eli Lilly Brings AI to Drug Delivery in METiS TechBio Deal

Hong Kong-listed METiS TechBio (HKEX:7666) could collect up to US$1.1 billion in milestone payments from Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE:LLY) under a new research pact to design lipid nanoparticles that carry medicines to specific tissues in the body.

Lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, carry therapeutic payloads to target tissues and cells. METiS will apply AiLNP, its proprietary AI platform for discovering and optimizing ionizable lipids, to develop delivery technologies that could improve how accurately LNPs reach their targets and how they distribute through the body.

The partners plan to pair METiS' generative and predictive AI capabilities with Lilly's scientific and development know-how to discover and refine new LNP architectures.

METiS says those designs may improve tissue specificity and therapeutic performance, with potential applications across multiple disease areas.

"Delivery remains a critical determinant of therapeutic success, particularly as the industry expands into increasingly sophisticated modalities," METiS Chairman and CEO Chris Lai said in the announcement.

"By combining METiS' AI-powered platform with Lilly's scientific expertise and development capabilities, we aim to unlock a new generation of tissue-targeted delivery technologies that have the potential to transform how medicines reach patients," Lai added.

The announcement did not name the diseases or therapeutic modalities the partners will pursue first, or how the milestone payments are staged.

Lilly continues to pursue its push towards the AI sector, signing a larger AI deal with another Hong Kong-listed company earlier this year. Insilico Medicine (HKEX:3696) is a clinical-stage biotech that uses generative AI and automation in drug discovery.

That agreement gives Lilly an exclusive worldwide license to develop, manufacture and commercialize novel oral therapeutics in preclinical development for certain indications. The two companies will also run multiple R&D programs on targets Lilly selects, using Insilico's Pharma.AI platforms.

"Insilico's AI-enabled discovery capabilities represent a powerful complement to Lilly's deep expertise in clinical development across multiple therapeutic areas," Andrew Adams, Lilly's group vice president of molecule discovery, said in Insilico's announcement of the deal.

Lilly has also invested in its own AI computing infrastructure. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) said in October 2025 that Lilly was deploying a DGX SuperPOD with DGX B300 systems, built with 1,016 Blackwell Ultra GPUs, and described it 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 for drug discovery and development. Select models will go on Lilly TuneLab, a platform that gives biotech companies access to drug discovery models built on US$1 billion worth of Lilly's proprietary data.

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Securities Disclosure: I, Giann Liguid, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.