Circle Pharma Partners with Eli Lilly to Boost AI-Driven Drug Discovery

Circle Pharma, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, has partnered with Eli Lilly and Company to use Lilly TuneLab, an artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) platform designed to accelerate the development of new medicines by providing biotech companies access to powerful drug discovery models that have been trained on Lilly’s proprietary research data.

Circle Pharma will leverage Lilly TuneLab to further strengthen its AI/ML capabilities and proprietary MXMO platform, which is designed to overcome key challenges in macrocycle drug development to enable the creation of intrinsically cell-permeable and orally bioavailable macrocycle therapies, including for historically undruggable targets. Circle Pharma’s lead program, CID-078, is a first-in-class, orally bioavailable cyclin A/B RxL inhibitor that is being evaluated in a Phase 1 clinical trial for patients with advanced solid tumors.

“We are thrilled to partner with Lilly and gain access to TuneLab,” said Constantine Kreatsoulas, Ph.D., senior vice president, head of discovery technology sciences at Circle Pharma. “This collaboration will further enhance our MXMO platform, which enables us to better predict how various types of macrocycles may be able to penetrate cells, show oral bioavailability, exhibit desirable drug-like properties, and be manufactured at scale. This collaboration comes at an important time of growth at Circle Pharma with our lead program, CID-078, now in clinical development and our preclinical pipeline advancing rapidly to address cyclins and other historically undruggable targets in oncology.”