Reaching for the summit in TB

When it comes to deals, it's the larger partner that generally gets the commercialization rights in the major markets. But to get rights to a tuberculosis compound from Summit plc for its Lilly TB Drug Discovery Initiative, Eli Lilly and Co. let Summit retain rights in the developed world. What the TB Initiative gets is a series of compounds specific to Mycobacterium tuberculosiswith a novel mechanism of action that the pharma would market in the developing world.

The public-private partnership, which Lilly formed in June 2007, announced the acquisition of its first two compounds last month: an unnamed compound from Summit, and CPZEN-45, which was donated by the non-profit Microbial Chemistry Research Foundation (MCRF)...