Lilly's opening moves

When Eli Lilly and Co. launched its Phenotypic Drug Discovery Initiative in 2009, its goal was to apply a crowdsourcing approach to finding new small molecules from external investigators that fit the company's core disease focus areas. Based on the positive results of the program, which focuses on phenotypic assays, the pharma has added six assays against defined targets as well as a tuberculosis assay.

The renamed Open Innovation Drug Discovery platform is one of two forays the pharma is making into the open innovation space. Lilly has also joined a public-private partnership (PPP) to identify IP-free molecules against epigenetic targets. The PPP is being led by the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC)...