Last Stop Biotech

Eli Lily has gained a massive advantage in securing a stronger foothold in the obesity drug landscape. Eli Lily is already leading the market, which is expected to reach around $150 billion. Eli Lilly has entered into a $1.3 billion agreement with GPCR-focused biotech Superluminal. Under the collaboration, Superluminal will leverage its proprietary GPCR platform to discover and optimize small-molecule therapies targeting undisclosed programs in cardiometabolic diseases and obesity. Lilly will hold exclusive rights to develop and commercialize the resulting compounds. In exchange, Superluminal is eligible to receive up to $1.3 billion through a mix of upfront and near-term payments, an equity stake, and development and commercial milestone payments. The companies did not disclose the specific financial breakdown.

GPCRs are cell membrane–embedded proteins that enable cells to communicate and sense changes in their environment. While about 35% of all approved drugs act on GPCRs, roughly 70% of the more than 800 known receptors remain unaddressed by existing therapies, the biotech noted when announcing its $120 million Series A in September 2024.

“GPCRs have established themselves as very important targets in the obesity and cardiometabolic landscape, but we’re at the very early stages of exploration of the target class,”

Superluminal CEO Cony D’Cruz

Eli Lily aims to leverage Superluminal’s strengths, including their proprietary Hyperloop™ platform. It synergizes structure-based drug design, utilizing AI/ML algorithms, and experimental validation for rapid therapeutic candidate generation. The predict-design-test framework models protein structures precisely and designs highly selective compounds to drive specific structural changes toward therapeutic effect. They have also developed expertise on historically challenging targets—GPCRs, which are critical to human physiology and under-exploited in drug development.

Superluminal has also demonstrated its ability to expedite drug development by advancing six small-molecule programs. Notably, a lead candidate—an orally administered, selective, biased MC4R agonist targeting obesity—has advanced into IND-enabling studies ($2025) and is expected to enter clinical trials in 2026. This MC4R agonist targeting rare, inherited obesity disorders, with first-in-human studies, is excluded from the agreement with Lilly.