Oblique said the partnership will generate milestones and royalties if successful. Image credit: Shutterstock/ Tada Images.

Eli Lilly is strengthening its ties with Oblique Therapeutics, as the two companies announced an expansion to their collaboration agreement to include a second “high-value target”.

Building on the existing agreement from November 2023, Eli Lilly will continue to use Oblique’s AbiProt platform to discover antibodies. Specifically, Sweden-based Oblique will partner with Lilly Catalyze360-ExploR&D, an arm of the company that offers clinical development capabilities for partnered biotechs and drug developers, as per a 22 August press release.

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The financial terms of the expanded deal were not disclosed, and neither was the target of its application. Oblique did state that if treatments are developed successfully, the partnership will “generate milestones and royalties”.

Abiprot identifies therapeutic antibodies that can be programmed to have a specific pharmacological function. Oblique states its technology can help develop effective medicines against difficult-to-drug target proteins. The biotech’s platform uses microfluidics and proteases as molecular probes and provides sequence and structure information for epitope identification.

Oblique itself says it focuses on pain projects in its internal portfolio. AbiProt has previously been used to discover and develop two antibodies targeting TRPV1 and KRAS for pain and cancer respectively, as per a research article published in Science Advances.

Oblique’s CEO Christer Nordstedt said: “We are delighted to expand the collaboration between our companies and together create new science to address the unmet medical need in severe diseases. This collaboration with Lilly is of great importance to us and will further strengthen our position within the antibody discovery space.”

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This is not the only antibody discovery partnership Eli Lilly has tapped this year. The drugmaker expanded a partnership with AbCellera Biologics to discover therapeutic antibodies in immunology, cardiovascular disease and neuroscience programmes in August. The original agreement between the two companies has been fruitful, with eight programmes progressing as a result.

Eli Lilly also acquired French biotech company Mablink to solidify its antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) framework. Mablink’s PSARLink technology disguises cancer-killing molecules, allowing them to be delivered precisely to cancer cells while sparing healthy cells.