Eli Lilly has inked a licensing deal worth up to $1bn with Swedish Alzheimer’s-focused biotech, AlzeCure – marking a continuation of the pharma giant’s 2026 dealmaking spree.
Lilly will secure the rights to AlzeCure’s therapeutic candidate, ACD680, in exchange for $10m upfront, more than $990m in potential development and commercial milestone payments and mid-single digit royalties on any sales that come from the agreement.
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The biotech has designed ACD680, a preclinical-stage, small molecule gamma-secretase modulator, to reduce the production of amyloid-beta, the accumulation of which has previously been linked to amyloid plaque formation in the brain and potential disease progression in patients with Alzheimer’s.
By diminishing the production of Aβ42, a protein that contributes to the formation of amyloid plaques in the brain, while enhancing the production of shorter, benign amyloid-beta proteins, Aβ37 and Aβ38, AlzeCure theorises that ACD680 can potentially serve as a disease-modifying therapy (DMT) in Alzheimer’s, reducing the aggregation of Aβ42 and the subsequent build-up of harmful plaques.
Lilly eyes Alzheimer’s legacy extension
If Lilly’s licensing agreement with AlzeCure bears fruit, it will expand the former’s legacy in the Alzheimer’s space, which the pharma giant joined with its anti-Aβ therapy, Kisunla (donanemab).
Since its US approval in 2024, however, the drug – alongside other anti-amyloid Alzheimer’s therapies like Biogen’s Leqembi (lecanemab) – has come under fire in the Cochrane review, as the writers claim drugs like Kisunla and Leqembi display an “absent or trivial” impact on cognitive decline. Both Lilly and Biogen refuted the review’s findings, with the former noting that the pooling of data from anti-amyloid therapies that failed in clinical development marks a “significant methodological limitation that undermines the review’s conclusions about approved therapies.”
While some question the efficacy of amyloid beta-targeting drugs in Alzheimer’s, many are still betting on the target as the key to the treatment of this neurodegenerative disease, as there are currently 28 drugs in clinical development that target the protein in some way, according to GlobalData’s Pharmaceutical Intelligence Center.
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Lilly strikes again
Lilly’s agreement with AlzeCure adds another to the growing list of deals inked by the pharma giant this year, as the company pledges billions to buy up promising biotechs, platforms, technologies and drug candidates.
Last week, Lilly penned three high-profile deals – one of them being a $1.9bn partnership with genetic medicines specialist, Ascidian, which will see the pair work in tandem to discover and develop RNA-based exon editors for kidney diseases caused by a singular gene. The company also forged a $1.26bn licensing deal with Hanmi Pharm centred around its glucagon-like peptide 2 (GLP-2) agonist, sonefpeglutide, while signing a $3bn deal with Haisco Pharmaceutical to develop innovative medicines.
Just a few days before these deals, the pharma company also outlaid $3.83bn in a trio of vaccine biotech takeovers, which saw the company buy shingles-focused, Curevo, bacterial infection specialist, LimmaTech Biologics, and the Epstein-Barr virus jab developer, the Vaccine Company.
