Eli Lilly to take big swings in Alzheimer’s, ALS and gene therapy

Heart disease. Hearing loss. Addiction. Chronic pain. Alzheimer’s. ALS. These are among the areas where Eli Lilly, flush with money from its GLP-1 drugs, desires to make big bets. 

These are the ideas which can be “hiding in plain sight,” said Lilly Chief Scientific Officer Dan Skovronsky. They’re places where other pharmaceutical corporations may not need to go because they’re hard problems to unravel. 

“As right away really the largest health-care company on the planet, probably the largest health-care company on the planet ever, we now have an obligation,” Skovronsky said. “Investors have given us that vote of confidence. We see that as an obligation to take a position in a few of these big problems which can be hiding in plain sight, to attempt to make a difference for the health of your community.” 

Lilly’s tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for obesity, has transformed the corporate. The corporate’s sales have grown almost 60% since Mounjaro was approved in 2022. Lilly’s stock price has rocketed 268% higher within the last three years, giving the corporate a market cap of $823 billion – the very best of any health-care company. 

Now the corporate wants that success to translate to other disease areas.

Lilly’s already testing whether its drug Kisunla can prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Kisunla is a monoclonal antibody that removes amyloid plaques from the brain, that are related to the memory-robbing disease. It’s currently approved to treat people within the early stages of Alzheimer’s. 

The corporate’s recruiting seniors at churches, Walmart parking lots and other venues to provide them a blood test and see in the event that they’re prone to the disease. A few of the people within the trial will receive Kisunla and others will receive a placebo. Once enough of the participants are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Lilly will look and see if there is a difference between individuals who received its drug and folks who received a placebo. 

“If we are able to prevent it, even in half of the patients, that will likely be a revolution in how we take into consideration diagnosing and treating Alzheimer’s,” Skovronsky said. “It’d probably mark a significant inflection point in how these sorts of medicines are used.” 

Lilly’s also investing heavily in gene therapy at a time when the sector is facing significant uncertainty. Last summer, the corporate opened the $700 million Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine in Boston, away from Lilly’s headquarters in Indianapolis and in considered one of the U.S. epicenters for this work. 

Biopharma corporations large and small are struggling to show the potential of scientific breakthroughs like gene-editing technology Crispr-Cas9 into blockbuster drugs. One among the holdups has been determining the best way to get the treatments to their destinations contained in the body, or delivery, because it’s known within the industry. 

“The fact is that local delivery goes to be form of a small application to human health, but once we crack that, and I feel Lily is the corporate that may crack it, because once we take into consideration delivering to other tissues, it is not just the genetic medicine, it’s how do you package it? How do you goal it with antibodies or small molecules? Those are things we’re really good at,” Skovronsky said. 

Lilly is uniquely positioned to take the massive swings. Whether it could actually hit them stays to be seen.