Lilly ventures into pulmonary fibrosis with startup Mediar

January 10, 2025

Boston-area startup Mediar Therapeutics is teaming up with Eli Lilly on a new drug for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

Lilly — one of the five large pharmas backing Mediar – will pay $99 million in combined upfront and near-term milestones as part of a new pact, the companies said Friday morning. The Indianapolis pharmaceutical behemoth is also promising up to $687 million more in development and commercialization biobucks to access the startup’s experimental drug, which neutralizes a fibrotic signaling pathway known as WISP-1.

In the first half of this year, Mediar will start a Phase 2 of its human IgG1 antibody, dubbed MTX-463. The company will test the antibody in patients with IPF in about 15 countries, CEO Rahul Ballal told Endpoints News. After that, Lilly will have the option to take the candidate into Phase 3 development, the companies said.

The partnership is the result of a competitive process that began around last year’s JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, Ballal said.

The Lilly payments, which come after an $85 million Series A in March 2023, will help Mediar fund the mid-stage IPF trial and bring another in-house candidate into Phase 2 in the second half of this year, the company said. That second program is MTX-474, which neutralizes EphrinB2 signaling, and will be tested in patients with systemic sclerosis. A third pipeline program, going after SMOC2, is also in the works.

“As you think about the matrix of when to fund, how to fund, and ultimately what you give away to fund those things, the Lilly deal hit all of those boxes,” Ballal said. The biotech has a little over 30 employees, he added.

IPF landscape
Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a lung-scarring condition that can lead to death within about five years of diagnosis. Mediar’s second employee lost their father to the disease in 2022, chief scientific officer Paul Yaworsky previously told Endpoints.

There are no disease-modifying drugs approved for the condition. The two FDA-approved medicines  — Roche’s Esbriet and Boehringer Ingelheim’s Ofev — slow the disease. Roche is considering selling its decade-old medicine. Meanwhile, Boehringer hopes to get another IPF drug approved soon, and multiple other biopharmas are looking to treat the condition.

IPF appears to be a relatively new area for Lilly, which for the past few years has dominated headlines for its work in obesity, diabetes and Alzheimer’s, and has become the world’s most valuable drugmaker by market cap. Last fall, Lilly invested in Arda Therapeutics, an ADC startup that might go into pulmonary fibrosis and other similar areas, according to its CEO.

Lilly might have had a chance in IPF years ago. One of the well-funded biotechs in the space, Endeavor BioMedicines, is developing an IPF drug that Lilly had tested for cancer but offloaded to another company before it landed at Endeavor.

AUTHOR
Kyle LaHucik
Senior Reporter
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@ky_lahucik
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