Eli Lilly announced Tuesday a "multi-million dollar investment" to expand R&D in the area of multi-specific therapeutics, which are designed to combine the effects of two or more drugs into a single molecule. "In many therapeutic areas - for instance,

diabetes and oncology- one medicine isn't enough for patients to manage their disease," remarked Tom Bumol, the company's vice president of biotechnology discovery research.

Bumol noted that creating one drug that hits multiple molecular targets at once may in some circumstances be more effective than treating patients with two separate drugs.

"We can literally dial in the properties we want by protein engineering," he explained, adding that Eli Lilly is "going to make a big push on this."

The company already has at least seven multi-specific agents in preclinical testing for cancer and autoimmune disease, Bumol noted, with the most advanced being developed to treat diabetes.

The compound, a co-agonist peptide, is expected to enter clinical trials by the end of the year, he added. Eli Lilly currently has approximately 35 to 45 people working on the technology and plans to hire about 40 more.

Other companies are working on similar technology, including Abbott and Zyngenia.
Abbott spokeswoman Raquel Powers noted that its first drug using this technology will enter clinical development this year for autoimmune diseases. Peter Kiener, CEO of Zyngenia, which has a breast cancer compound in the early stages of testing that targets five molecules, remarked that "there are probably at least 10 to 20 companies working on" multi-targeted compounds.