Eli Lilly Expands Pipeline with $2.4B Orna Acquisition and AI Drug Development Push

Eli Lilly agreed to purchase Boston area-based biotech Orna Therapeutics for $2.4 billion in cash on Feb. 9. Orna is developing innovative medicines using circular RNA that can manipulate a patient's genes and/or cells to fight diseases, in particular autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

Orna is developing a therapy with the working name ORN-252 that allows the patient's body to generate the changes needed to fight the disease, rather than modifying them in a lab. It's called in vivo chimeric antigen receptor T-cell technology, and while it's still in early-stage development, the therapy appears to be very promising. According to Lilly's announcement of the acquisition deal, ORN-252 is "clinical trial-ready," which means it could still be several years away from commercial sales.

Just a day before the Orna announcement, the company announced it was paying $350 million upfront to collaborate with a Chinese biotechnology firm to develop treatments for immune disorders and cancer. In January it announced another billion-dollar deal with a German company to develop hearing-loss gene therapies.

According to the company's chief scientific and medical officer: "We [Eli Lilly] achieved positive outcomes for nearly all R&D key events in 2025, a rare set of results in this industry." The majority of those results were in weight management or diabetes. Eli Lilly's retatrutide, a next-gen anti-obesity medicine, performed well in a phase 3 study, as did orforglipron, an oral GLP-1 racing toward approval.

However, Eli Lilly also made solid clinical progress in other areas. For instance, the company's cancer medicine, Jaypirca, aced a phase 3 study and is well on its way to earning label expansions. In 2025, Eli Lilly also reported that its Alzheimer's disease medicine, Kisunla, is helping slow cognitive decline in a long-term study.

Eli Lilly is looking to further boost its clinical trial success rate. That's why the drugmaker is investing in artificial intelligence, notably by building what will become the industry's largest AI supercomputer, among other initiatives. Eli Lilly hopes to leverage AI to accelerate drug development. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced last year that it was phasing out animal models in favor of other methods, including AI-based models.

According to some data, the success rate for phase 2 studies is only about 50%, and it rises to 59% in phase 3. Estimates do vary, and these rates are also not uniform across different therapeutic areas. But the basic point is that a surprisingly high percentage of medicines, even those that make it to late-stage studies, don't end up on the market.

Last year Lilly's medication -- called tirzepatide, which treats both type 2 diabetes and obesity -- became the best-selling drug on the planet. In doing so, it knocked Keytruda, the cancer immunotherapy drug made by Merck, off the throne. Tirzepatide is sold as Mounjaro for treating type 2 diabetes and as Zepbound for weight loss. Sales of tirzepatide have pushed Eli Lilly's stock 400% higher over the past five years.

A drug patent is typically 20 years, but because drug development takes so long (often more than 10 years), much of a patent is used up before the drug comes to market. So, the effective market exclusivity is often just 10 to 12 years.