Schrödinger Partners with Eli Lilly to Democratize AI Drug Discovery

On January 9, 2026, Schrödinger announced a partnership that gives biotech companies access to Eli Lilly's proprietary AI models trained on decades of drug discovery data. The New York-based computational platform provider will integrate Lilly's TuneLab directly into its LiveDesign enterprise informatics system, creating a unified workflow where chemists can run Lilly-trained predictions alongside physics-based simulations, all without leaving their existing platform.​

Large pharma companies have always held advantages like proprietary datasets from thousands of tested compounds, internal HPC infrastructure, and years of machine learning refinement. Biotech startups faced a choice, build expensive in-house computational teams or partner narrowly with big pharma on specific programs. TuneLab changes that dynamic.​

Lilly launched TuneLab in September 2025 as part of its broader Catalyze360 initiative to accelerate external innovation. The platform uses federated learning, a privacy-preserving technique where AI models train across decentralized datasets without exchanging raw data. Biotech partners contribute their experimental results to improve Lilly's models, but proprietary information remains encrypted and siloed from other users and Lilly's core systems.​

"TuneLab is hosted by a third-party and uses a privacy-first approach called federated learning, which allows Lilly and partner companies to use the platform while keeping their proprietary data separate and private," Schrödinger confirmed in its official announcement.​