Jubilant Organosys enters pact with Eli Lilly & Co

New Delhi: Jubilant Organosys has entered into an agreement with US-based Eli Lilly & Co to form an equally-owned joint venture company in India that will focus on providing drug development services.

The two companies will invest $8 million over the next 3 years in the new venture, which will be based in Bangalore. The joint venture, which is likely to be operational by next quarter, will take up new molecules from Jubilant, Eli Lilly as well as any third party for early stage drug development.

Explaining the relevance of the joint venture, Mr Hari S. Bhartia, Co-Chairman & Managing Director said, “This is a booming business because globally there are a number of drugs which are going off patent. Therefore drug makers need to have a strong pipeline of products to sustain their revenues going forward.”

The joint venture will focus in developing drugs in the areas of oncology, diabetes and metabolic diseases.

Eli Lilly currently has an outsourcing partnership with Jubilant for conducting pre-clinical trials.

The new joint venture company will focus on the next stage of drug development before returning successful assets to the owners of the intellectual property for further development.

Mr Shyam S. Bhartia, Chairman of Jubilant Organosys, said “We are very pleased to expand our collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company from discovery to clinical development, leveraging India’s emerging clinical capabilities.

As in our discovery collaboration, we believe this unique partnership will be a pioneering effort in leveraging the expertise of a global pharmaceutical company like Lilly with the emerging development capabilities of Jubilant, in accelerating drug development to provide patients with affordable health care in areas of unmet medical needs.”

Mr Robert Armstrong, Vice-President of global external research and development at Lilly, added, “This is a great addition to Lilly’s quest to create a networked R&D organisation that will bring to bear resources and capability from around the world to help address important medical needs for patients globally.

“This collaboration with Jubilant will continue to strengthen our capabilities in Asia.”