Morning auction jumps 15%: Jitai Technology (07666) rides the Biological AI wave, secures US$1.1 billion Lilly AI-LNP platform order

On October 19, METIS TECHBIO-P (07666) reached a collaboration with globally renowned multinational pharmaceutical company Lilly on the world's largest AI-driven extrahepatic LNP delivery platform deal, which is also China's first strategic collaboration on a generative AI-LNP platform. In this major strategic collaboration with a total value of up to US$1.1 billion, the two parties will focus on the research and discovery of novel LNP (lipid nanoparticle) delivery solutions to explore tissue-specific delivery solutions supporting multiple therapeutic modalities. On October 20, Jitai Technology's stock price rose nearly 15% at most during the morning auction session, showing the market's positive feedback to the above positive news. Strong alliance to deepen the global Biological AI ecosystem empowerment It is understood that LNP has become an important technical means for targeting target tissues and cells to achieve delivery of therapeutic payloads, but the discovery of traditional LNP lipid structures has long relied on researchers' empirical design and extensive experimental screening, with long cycles and limited explorable space. To address the pain points of traditional technical means, this collaboration will combine Jitai Technology's capabilities in rational design and optimization of LNP using generative AI and predictive AI with Lilly's expertise in scientific research and drug development, jointly focusing on discovering and optimizing novel LNP structures, with the aim of improving tissue specificity, enhancing therapeutic efficacy, and expanding the application of LNP technology in multiple disease areas. According to the collaboration agreement, Jitai will rely on AiLNP (AI nano delivery system design platform), an ionizable lipid discovery and optimization platform driven by NanoForge, to develop a new generation of delivery technology that enhances LNP delivery targeting and optimizes in vivo distribution. Lilly, in turn, will contribute its advantageous resources in drug discovery, development, and commercialization to accelerate the advancement of the collaboration between the two parties. To maintain long-term competitiveness, Lilly has in recent years been using AI technology to prospectively build a layout for next-generation revolutionary therapeutic modalities, aiming to replicate the success of GLP-1 in emerging fields such as nucleic acid drugs, gene editing, mRNA therapies, and in vivo cell therapies. Its primary goal is to break through the dilemma of the above new therapies being limited by insufficient delivery selectivity, expand the range of druggable targets, and thereby drive them from proof of concept to clinical translation. However, compared with traditional organ-level delivery, which only needs to solve the enrichment problem, tissue/cell-level selective delivery requires simultaneously breaking through multiple barriers such as cell recognition, uptake, and intracellular functional release, placing higher technical threshold requirements on lipid structure design and in vivo distribution prediction. For Lilly, Jitai, with its technical advantages, is one of the few globally available collaboration targets. As an AI nano delivery platform independently developed by Jitai Technology, NanoForge adopts a self-developed integrated innovation framework of "dry lab + wet lab + intelligent agents" and has achieved a complete chain covering AI protein generation, in vivo delivery technology, and next-generation immunotherapy development. The platform has now accumulated more than 10 million lipid structures and 100,000 experimental data points, empowered the advancement of more than 10 first-in-class or best-in-class pipelines, and achieved breakthrough progress in targeted delivery to 8 important human organs and tissues/cells. The AiLNP platform driven by NanoForge is the world's first AI for Nano lipid de novo generation algorithm, lipid language foundation model, METiS intelligent agent ALAN, and high-throughput dry-wet lab closed-loop iteration platform, and has now become key infrastructure in the Biological AI field. For Jitai, this collaboration marks that the company is using artificial intelligence to drive delivery technology to achieve a key leap from organ targeting to tissue- and cell-level selective delivery, making substantive progress from "achieving drug enrichment in specific organs" to "delivering therapeutic payloads to specific cell types within tissues." Commercialization milestones accelerating toward realization According to the terms of this agreement, Jitai Technology will be eligible to receive an upfront payment of more than US$10 million and will be eligible to receive development, regulatory, and commercial milestone payments totaling up to US$1.1 billion. In addition, Jitai Technology is also eligible to receive tiered royalty payments in the single-digit percentage range based on annual net sales of collaboration products. In fact, driven by extensive commercialization collaborations in recent years, Jitai has been able to continuously validate its platform capabilities through the rolling realization of orders, upfront payments, milestones, and revenue sharing: in June this year, Jitai reached a global exclusive licensing agreement with Boulevard Bio, established with support from the world's top health investment and innovation platform Deerfield, with a total value of up to US$1.6 billion, thereby setting a new record for the amount of a single preclinical TCE license in China; the company also achieved infrastructure-level application of NanoForge outside the industry, promoting collaboration between the company's AiTEM AI formulation innovation platform and Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals; in the CGT field, the company has reached technical collaborations with a number of benchmark enterprises in segmented fields, with total potential transaction value exceeding RMB 6 billion. And this major strategic collaboration with Lilly is undoubtedly another concrete manifestation of the accelerated realization of the value of Jitai's NanoForge platform. In recent years, Jitai Technology's independently developed key Biological AI infrastructure NanoForge platform has gained broad recognition from international professional investment institutions and leading multinational pharmaceutical companies. The company's major strategic collaboration with Lilly this time has clearly once again verified NanoForge's strong capability to continuously produce globally valuable innovative assets.