Circle Pharma Announces Agreement with Lilly to Further Enhance AI/ML Capabilities and Accelerate Development of New Oral Macrocycle Therapies

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Circle Pharma, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company pioneering next-generation targeted macrocycle therapeutics for difficult-to-treat cancers, today announced an agreement with Eli Lilly and Company (Lilly) that enables the company to use Lilly TuneLab, a pioneering artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) platform designed to accelerate the development of new medicines by providing biotech companies access to powerful drug discovery models that have been trained on Lilly’s proprietary research data.

Circle Pharma will leverage Lilly TuneLab to further strengthen its AI/ML capabilities and proprietary MXMO™ platform, which is designed to overcome key challenges in macrocycle drug development to enable the creation of intrinsically cell-permeable and orally bioavailable macrocycle therapies, including for historically undruggable targets. Circle Pharma’s lead program, CID-078, is a first-in-class, orally bioavailable cyclin A/B RxL inhibitor that is being evaluated in a Phase 1 clinical trial for patients with advanced solid tumors.

“We are thrilled to partner with Lilly and gain access to TuneLab,” said Constantine Kreatsoulas, Ph.D., senior vice president, head of discovery technology sciences at Circle Pharma. “This collaboration will further enhance our MXMO™ platform, which enables us to better predict how various types of macrocycles may be able to penetrate cells, show oral bioavailability, exhibit desirable drug-like properties, and be manufactured at scale. This collaboration comes at an important time of growth at Circle Pharma with our lead program, CID-078, now in clinical development and our preclinical pipeline advancing rapidly to address cyclins and other historically undruggable targets in oncology.”

This agreement is part of the Lilly Catalyze360 model, a comprehensive approach to empower early-stage biotechs to advance groundbreaking science by providing access to capital, cutting-edge lab space and technology, and drug development talent and resources.

About Circle Pharma’s MXMO™ platform

Circle Pharma’s proprietary MXMO™ platform combines computationally driven drug design along with advanced, fully synthetic macrocycle chemistry. Through this platform, Circle Pharma’s scientists screen vast permeability-biased physical and virtual macrocycle libraries to identify early hit compounds. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and rigorous physics-based simulations are used to assess many designs simultaneously and to rapidly explore structure-activity relationships for hit-to-lead progression. These diverse compounds are then synthesized in the lab, utilizing both natural and unnatural chemical building blocks, many of which are custom and proprietary to Circle Pharma, to evaluate them as lead investigational macrocycles.

About Circle Pharma

Circle Pharma is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company harnessing the power of macrocycles to develop next-generation targeted therapies for cancer and other serious illnesses. The company’s proprietary MXMO™ platform overcomes key challenges in macrocycle drug development, enabling the creation of intrinsically cell-permeable and orally bioavailable therapies, including for historically undruggable targets. Circle Pharma’s pipeline is focused on targeting cyclins, key regulators of the cell cycle that drive many cancers. The company’s lead program, CID-078, is a cyclin A/B RxL inhibitor in Phase 1 clinical development for patients with advanced solid tumors. Circle Pharma is based in South San Francisco, CA. For additional information, please visit us at circlepharma.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.