San Francisco-based Chai Discovery announced a collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company’s (NYSE: LLY) TuneLab platform that will make Chai’s frontier AI miniprotein design suite available on a free trial basis to select biotech companies participating in the TuneLab ecosystem. The agreement marks Chai Discovery’s second with Lilly, following a January 2026 deal in which Lilly licensed Chai’s platform directly and commissioned a custom AI model trained on Lilly’s proprietary discovery data. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Chai’s platform uses generative AI to design de novo protein binders against difficult biological targets, allowing candidate generation entirely in silico, in hours rather than months, according to the firm. Under the TuneLab arrangement, participating biotechs receive access to these in silico candidate generation capabilities during a structured evaluation period; a deployment license is required before any further preclinical optimization or testing can proceed.
Lilly TuneLab, launched in September 2025 as part of the company’s broader Catalyze360 initiative, is an AI/ML drug discovery platform that gives biotech companies access to models trained on Lilly’s proprietary research data, which Lilly estimates was generated at a cost exceeding USD 1 billion. The platform uses federated learning to allow participating companies to run Lilly’s predictive models without directly exposing either party’s proprietary data. TuneLab sits alongside Lilly Ventures, Lilly Gateway Labs, and Lilly ExploR&D within the Catalyze360 portfolio. The addition of Chai Discovery’s miniprotein design capabilities extends TuneLab’s offering from small-molecule predictive models into the biologics discovery space, where de novo protein binder design represents a distinct and complementary capability.
The deal continues a pattern of rapid external partnership activity for both parties. Chai Discovery separately licensed its generative AI platform to Pfizer in June 2026, including early access to Chai-3, a next-generation antibody design model, in a deal that also included a custom-trained version of the platform built on Pfizer’s internal data. Meanwhile, Lilly has pursued an aggressive AI-enabled discovery strategy in 2026, including a USD 2.75 billion multi-target collaboration with Insilico Medicine (HKEX: 3696) announced in March and a USD 2.25 billion deal with Profluent focused on AI-designed genetic medicines. Within TuneLab specifically, the platform has onboarded a growing number of external partners since its launch, including Benchling, Collaborative Drug Discovery, and Vasa Therapeutics, each integrating TuneLab’s predictive models into their own workflows or discovery programs.
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