Eli Lilly has signed a deal worth $1.3 billion with privately held Superluminal Medicines to discover and develop small-molecule drugs through AI to treat obesity and other cardiometabolic diseases.

Lilly currently dominates the obesity treatment market, which is estimated to be worth $150 billion by the next decade, and is trying to strengthen its foothold in the space through the development of next-generation drugs, acquisitions and partnerships.

The deal gives Lilly access to Superluminal’s proprietary artificial-intelligence-driven platform to rapidly discover potential drug candidates targeting G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCR)—a class of proteins that can influence a range of physiological processes including metabolism, cell growth and immune responses—the drug developer said on

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