Lilly Making First Milestone Payment in $1.9B Collaboration with AC Immune

Eli Lilly will pay AC Immune CHF 30 million ($30.2 million) in the first milestone payment tied to the companies’ CHF 1.89 billion ($1.9 billion) collaboration launched in December to develop new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders, the Swiss biotech said today. AC Immune said it will receive the milestone payment on or before October 7, 2019, in “a recognition of progress in the collaboration between the two companies”—namely the launch in July of a Phase I trial of ACI-3024, the company’s lead tau aggregation inhibitor small molecule candidate. The Phase I trial is designed to assess the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics of ACI-3024 in healthy volunteers, AC Immune said, through a randomized, placebo controlled, double blind, sequential single and multiple ascending dose study with open label food effect and pharmacodynamics assessment arms. “The start of the ACI-3024 Phase 1 study, represents an important advancement in the broader effort we are making and further expands our robust clinical pipeline to address neurodegenerative diseases, in particular for therapeutics and diagnostics targeting Tau,” AC Immune CEO Prof. Andrea Pfeifer said in a statement.