BOSTON —The world’s most valuable drugmaker is finally opening its doors in the country’s biggest biotech hub.
Eli Lilly officially opened its gleaming new 12-story research center in Boston on Tuesday. The $700 million facility, first announced in 2022, will ultimately accommodate 700 people, mostly scientists working on some of the company’s earliest drug discovery programs.
The building was originally billed as the Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine but is now called the Lilly Seaport Innovation Center. A company spokesperson told Endpoints News that the genetic medicines group is housed in the building and is still the primary focus of the center, but that researchers working on other kinds of drugs will also share the space.
“There are more than 400 million people living with genetic disease worldwide,” chief scientific officer Dan Skovronsky said at the event. The company began focusing on genetic medicines in 2018.
“With a lot of persistence, it now accounts for nearly one-third of our portfolio,” he added.
Roughly two-thirds of the 346,000 square-foot building are devoted to lab space where scientists will work on drugs for several diseases, including diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, chronic pain and neurodegeneration — including Alzheimer’s.
The Indianapolis drugmaker has long conducted most of its research close to home. But as Lilly’s weight loss drugs have catapulted it to the top of the pharma world, its absence in Boston has grown conspicuous.
With a bit more than 200 people so far in its new building in Boston’s Seaport neighborhood, and room for about 300 more, Lilly’s presence in Massachusetts is still small compared to some pharma companies. Bristol Myers Squibb, Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi and Takeda each have major research hubs with thousands of workers just a few miles north in Cambridge, MA. And many other pharma companies, including Bayer and Novo Nordisk, maintain smaller outposts in the region.
The Seaport, sandwiched between downtown and South Boston, is becoming a secondary hotspot for life science companies crowded out of Kendall Square, the expensive biotech epicenter neighboring MIT in Cambridge. Lilly joins Foundation Medicine, Ginkgo Bioworks, and Vertex Pharmaceuticals in the neighborhood.
Lilly’s biggest competitor, Novo Nordisk, opened its own research center in the suburbs of Boston earlier this year. Leaders of that site told Endpoints that it will have an emphasis on genetic medicines for diabetes and obesity, with the goal of making alternative or complementary treatments to its blockbuster incretin franchise.
Lilly has been steadily acquiring, investing in, and partnering with smaller companies focused on genetic medicines over the past few years. It now has access to numerous technologies including AAV gene therapies, CRISPR base editing, short-lived RNA editing and more.
In a tour of the company’s non-viral nanomedicines lab, Michelle Lynn Hall, Lilly’s associate vice president of genetic medicines, explained that the center is heavily focused on brain diseases and studying how lipid-based delivery systems can be used to deliver drugs to different kinds of brain cells.
Lilly’s new research hub also has room for 200 scientists from up to 15 companies in a startup incubator and accelerator space called Lilly Gateway Labs. It will initially house four biotech companies: RNA-focused Amplitude Therapeutics and Tevard Biosciences, neuroinflammation-focused FireCyte Therapeutics, and Solu Therapeutics, which is pairing antibodies with bifunctional small molecules.
Daniel Fischer, co-founder and CEO of Tevard, said that his startup and others in the program are fully independent from Lilly but benefit from “the bump factor” of working in close proximity to the company’s scientists.
“We get a state-of-the-art facility, with competitive pricing, in a great location,” Fischer said, “and can reach out to reach any time we want to meet with Lilly management or scientists.”
Julie Gilmore, head of Lilly Gateway Labs, said that so far 24 companies have come through the company’s three other Gateway Labs locations in San Diego and San Francisco, and that Lilly has directly invested in more than 70% of them.