Chinese and US companies are teaming up to accelerate drug research, combining artificial intelligence with pharmaceutical expertise to discover new medicines and improve their delivery to targeted tissues and cells.

In the latest collaboration, Hong Kong-listed METiS TechBio announced an agreement with US drugmaker Eli Lilly and Company on Monday to develop AI-powered drug delivery technologies. The partners will work on lipid nanoparticles, tiny carriers that transport therapeutic substances to tissues and cells.

Under the agreement, METiS is eligible for an upfront payment in the low double-digit millions of dollars, up to approximately $1.1 billion in development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments, and royalties on resulting product sales, according to METiS.

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Chris Lai, chairman and CEO of METiS, said the agreement offers a way to build lasting research capabilities through a platform that can continually develop better delivery materials.

"This is not just about buying an existing delivery material, but building a delivery platform that can continually address unmet clinical needs," Lai told China Daily.

Drugmakers have often acquired delivery businesses because developing the technology takes years, he said. AI is changing the pace of preclinical research, creating opportunities to build and expand those capabilities through platform partnerships.

Lilly has also partnered with AI companies in drug discovery. In March, Hong Kong-listed Insilico Medicine Cayman TopCo, announced a global licensing and research agreement with Lilly worth up to $2.75 billion, including a $115 million upfront payment. The deal covers preclinical oral drug candidates and joint research programs in targets selected by Lilly.

"This collaboration allows us to explore novel mechanisms and accelerate the identification of promising therapeutic candidates across multiple disease areas," Andrew Adams, Lilly's group vice-president of molecule discovery, said in the Insilico announcement.

While those partnerships focus on finding promising medicines, METiS and Lilly are addressing the challenge of delivering treatments to the right tissues and cells. METiS will contribute its AI platform for designing and optimizing lipids, while Lilly will provide expertise in drug discovery, development and commercialization.

Lai said Lilly is interested in combining METiS' lipid-generating algorithms with repeated rounds of computational design and laboratory testing to develop delivery materials for tissues beyond the liver.

That requires balancing several properties at once. Improving a carrier's ability to reach its target must not compromise its capacity to encapsulate a drug or make it harder to synthesize, he said.

AI can assess those requirements together, using experimental feedback to refine designs, Lai said. Researchers traditionally optimize individual properties and then screen materials against other requirements.

METiS has accumulated data from laboratory experiments and studies in small and large animals, he said. Feeding the results back into its models helps guide the next round of research.

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Industry leaders and international scholars emphasize that high-stakes technological collaboration in the life sciences provides concrete mutual benefits that transcend regional tensions.

John Thornton, chairman of RedBird Capital Partners, called for China-US cooperation in AI, pointing to computer-simulated drug trials as an area where joint efforts could shorten development timelines and reduce costs, Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao reported.

Speaking at a summit co-hosted by Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management and the Philanthropy Asia Alliance in Beijing on Oct 15, Thornton said the benefits of such cooperation could extend to people worldwide, according to the report.

Contact the writers at lijing2009@chinadaily.com.cn