The control: Isomorphic Labs × Lilly and Novartis: the money is explicit, the acceptance thresholds are not

One of the Buyer Chains series. Each piece follows one chain, the AI company, its customer and sometimes the customer's customer, through five roles in the public record: who states the need, who sets the research direction, who runs the experiments, who validates the result, who decides to keep paying. It records only what the public record states and says who said each thing; a missing step is marked not yet public rather than filled in, and a company's own figure is written as the company's. The timeline at the end stays open: when the chain's next step reaches the public record, it goes on as a new line.

This one is the series' control, a pharma chain, because it is the class of AI-for-science deal whose buyer terms are most public. On 7 January 2024 Isomorphic Labs announced two collaborations on one day: Lilly pays $45M upfront, up to $1.7B in performance-based milestones and tiered royalties; Novartis pays $37.5M upfront plus selected research costs, on three undisclosed targets, with up to $1.2B in milestones.[13] The $1.7B and $1.2B are potential milestone payments; which scientific event each tranche is tied to (a candidate, an IND, each clinical phase, approval) is not itemised in the announcements. Such deals are staged by convention, but the thresholds stay between the parties.

What the buyer looks at, concretely

• Public: the frame. Upfront, "performance-based milestones", tiered royalties.[13]
• Not public: each gate. The scientific threshold behind a milestone (potency, selectivity, animal data) is in none of the announcements.
• Against materials: pharma's acceptance chain (IND, Phase I/II/III, approval) is the same across the industry, so a contract can state amounts without standards. Materials have no shared chain, so each buyer's standard has to be asked for separately. That is why the materials chains are harder to read than this one.

Not yet public · The scientific thresholds of the milestones; which programmes have triggered a payment; how far Isomorphic has taken each one.

Decision point · The next decision is Lilly's and Novartis's project committees': which molecule triggers the next milestone payment. What triggers it is not in the announcements.

The chain's timeline

• 2024-01Lilly ($45M upfront, up to $1.7B milestones) and Novartis ($37.5M upfront, up to $1.2B milestones)[13]
• 2026-01Multi-target, cross-modality deal with Johnson & Johnson: Isomorphic designs, J&J runs assays[14]
• 2026-05$2.1B Series B to move programmes toward the clinic[15]
• NextThe first molecule into the clinic, and which collaboration it belongs to. Awaiting public data.
• LaterThe first publicly disclosed milestone payment.

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