Eli Lilly to grow in new center
Pharma giant doubles employee estimates
Eli Lilly and Co., which transformed itself from a stodgy underperformer into one of the world’s hottest pharmaceutical companies, said Wednesday that the genetic medicine research center it plans to open in Boston in August will eventually employ twice as many workers as originally estimated.
In February 2022, Lilly said that it would increase its modest Massachusetts workforce from 120 to 250 employees when it opened the $700 million Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine along Fort Point Channel. The Indianapolis-based company said it would move 120 scientists from Kendall Square in Cambridge to the institute and add another 130.
But Daniel Skovronsky, Lilly’s chief scientific and medical officer, said in an interview that the 12-story, 334,000square-foot laboratory and office building will ultimately accommodate 500 Lilly scientists and researchers.
The firm has roughly 200 employees in Cambridge, who would move to the institute at 15 Necco St. With new hires over the next 10 months, the institute could have as many as 300 employees when it opens, eventually growing to 500.
Skovronsky, speaking during a break at the 2023 STAT Summit in Boston, said it was a no-brainer to open a genetic medicine center in Massachusetts, which boasts one of the world’s most robust biotech hubs, including many firms that focus on gene-based treatments.
“It’s incumbent on us to be where the scientists are,” said Skovronsky, who also serves as Lilly’s executive vice president. “We’re here in Boston for the talent for sure.”
Michael DiFiore, an analyst for Evercore ISI, agreed.
“They kind of need to be where the heat is, and that’s in Boston, where there’s so much academic and startup activity going on,” DiFiore said. “You almost can’t not have a presence there if you’re serious about next-generation technology platforms.”
The institute will focus on developing RNA-based medicine, gene therapies, and other treatments that address the root cause of diseases. RNA drugs use ribonucleic acid found in cells to turn genes on and off in the treatment of disease. Gene therapies replace defective genes with healthy ones to help fight illnesses.
Messenger RNA coronavirus vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer have introduced genetic medicine to the public on a wide scale. But the Lilly institute doesn’t plan to work on vaccines. Rather, it will concentrate on drugs similar to those pioneered by Cambridge biotech Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, according to Skovronsky.
In 2018, Alnylam won the first approval ever of a medicine that uses RNA interference, or RNAi, to “silence” disease-causing genes. The drug, called Onpattro, treated a rare inherited disease called hereditary transthyretin amyloidosis, or hATTR, which causes multiple serious symptoms, including nerve damage.
Alnylam has since persuaded drug regulators to approve four additional RNAi drugs for rare diseases. The medicines, which have annual list prices of six figures per patient, work by silencing disease-causing genes in the liver.
Lilly is running clinical trials of an RNAi drug delivered to the liver to treat a fatty particle in the blood called lipoprotein(a), Skovronsky said. High levels of that particle, also known as lp(a), can dramatically raise the risk of having a heart attack or stroke at an early age.
Lilly also plans to run clinical trials next year of experimental medicines that deliver the same gene-silencing technology to the brain to treat Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, he said.
“One of the things we’ve been working really hard on is making these kinds of technologies work in other organs,” Skovronsky said. “It’s really hard to get drugs into the brain, but I think we’ve been making good progress.”
In addition to housing Lilly employees, the new institute will include biotech space that other companies can use, modeled after Lilly’s Gateway Labs in San Francisco. The incubator will create opportunities for collaboration with Lilly scientists and could house an additional 150 workers, Lilly said.
Few pharmaceutical firms have generated more excitement lately than Lilly.
By the end of the year, the 147-year-old company is expected to win approval for both its Alzheimer’s treatment donanemab and its buzzy obesity drug tirzepatide, which it already markets as Mounjaro for diabetes.
‘They kind of need to be where the heat is, and that’s in Boston, where there’s so much academic and startup activity going on.’
MICHAEL DIFIORE
Evercore ISI analyst
Like Biogen’s recently approved Alzheimer’s drug Leqembi, donanemab removes deposits of a sticky toxic protein in the brain called beta-amyloid that is a hallmark of the disease. The Food and Drug Administration approved it in July after clinical trials showed the medicine modestly slowed cognitive decline in people with early Alzheimer’s.
Donanemab generated even more impressive results than Leqembi in a recently published study of patients with early Alzheimer’s symptoms, slowing the rate of cognitive decline by about 35 percent. Based on that, donanemab is widely expected to win FDA approval for people with mild impairment.
Lilly has also stirred excitement for tirzepatide, one in a wave of new drugs that have led to weight loss in patients. When Mounjaro was prescribed for people with type 2 diabetes, it helped those who were also overweight or obese lose up to nearly 15.7 percent of their body weight. Estimates for the size of the global obesity market by the end of the decade have ranged from $50 billion to $100 billion.
Lilly now boasts a staggering market value of $575 billion, the most of any big pharma company.