HAYA Therapeutics: Collaboration with Eli Lilly to target obesity and related metabolic conditions

HAYA Therapeutics, SA, a biotechnology company pioneering precision RNA-guided regulatory genome targeting therapeutics for chronic diseases, today announced a multi-year agreement with Eli Lilly and Company to apply HAYA’s advanced RNA-guided regulatory genome platform to support preclinical drug discovery efforts in obesity and related metabolic conditions. The partners will identify multiple regulatory genome derived RNA-based drug targets to address these chronic conditions.

Under the terms of the collaboration, HAYA will receive an upfront payment, including an equity investment, and is eligible to receive up to an aggregate $1 billion in pre-clinical, clinical and commercial milestone payments, as well as royalties on product sales.

HAYA’s proprietary regulatory genome discovery platform enables the identification of tissue-, disease- and cell-specific long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) targets and the development of RNA-targeting therapies, with potentially better efficacy and less toxicity than current treatments, to reprogram disease-driving cell states. This collaboration will utilize HAYA’s full-stack regulatory genome platform to identify, characterize and validate multiple novel lncRNA targets for the potential development of new treatments for obesity and related metabolic disorders.

"This partnership with Lilly demonstrates the significant advances we have made with our revolutionary regulatory genome RNA-guided platform and validates the potential of targeting lncRNA for chronic conditions," said Samir Ounzain, CEO, HAYA Therapeutics. "We look forward to working closely with Lilly, an established leader in developing treatments for metabolic diseases, to help bring patients novel disease-modifying therapeutics that could offer greater efficacy, safety and accessibility than currently available treatments."