A year of advancing the Lilly-Purdue $250M research partnership to accelerate medicine discovery and manufacturing

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Since announcing a transformational $250 million partnership in May 2025, Purdue University and Eli Lilly and Company have steadily deepened collaboration across campus, launched new interdisciplinary research initiatives and activated the first phase of funding to accelerate pharmaceutical innovation.

The seven-year Lilly-Purdue 360 Initiative, which is the largest announced industry-academic agreement of its kind in the U.S., seeks to expedite innovation at every stage of the pharmaceutical pipeline.

Throughout the first year of the partnership, teams from Lilly and Purdue have been working in lockstep to build and refine a shared research agenda, accelerating the integration of AI‑enabled approaches in drug discovery, advanced manufacturing, data science and next‑generation therapeutics.

“Our institutions have a shared history that is almost 150 years old, and together we have strengthened the life sciences ecosystem in our state and country,” said Purdue President Mung Chiang. “With excellence at scale, we are expanding ‘AI for medicine’ research efforts, manufacturing innovation and workforce development to meet strategic needs for Lilly, while also creating incredible opportunities for our faculty and students.”

The Lilly-Purdue 360 Initiative will cover every phase of pharmaceutical research from molecule discovery to patient delivery. The partnership is administered through the Eli Lilly and Company and Purdue University Research Alliance Center (LPRC) , which serves as a nexus of cooperation between Purdue and Lilly researchers.

The university has received $24 million in funding to support 2025-26 programs and will request additional funding in the future. 

Throughout 2026, Purdue will launch six individual programs stemming from the initiatives in Lilly’s organizational pillars: drug discovery, product research and development, manufacturing, and talent. The current priority areas include:

• Agentic drug discovery
• Embodied AI/robotics
• Lilly Medicine Foundry
• Nanomedicine
• Routes of drug administrations
• Talent flow at scale

The partnership is already engaging faculty and staff from multiple colleges, including engineering, pharmacy, science, health and human sciences, and the Mitch Daniels School of Business. In 2026, the interdisciplinary program will further expand its reach, bringing together faculty researchers from every college at Purdue.

The Lilly-Purdue 360 Initiative will also offer more academic opportunities for students. The university expects to increase participation from 80 to more than 100 graduate students and postdocs in 2026.

As a pillar of the partnership, workforce development efforts will reach across campus to attract a diverse cohort into the program; 2025 had 176 undergraduate participants, with more than 225 targeted in calendar year 2026.

“Our ability to respond at the ‘speed of industry’ is a hallmark of Purdue’s commitment to Lilly, and all of our partners, through innovation,” said Preeti Sivasankar, executive director of the Lilly Purdue Research Center and vice president for research innovation in the Office of Research. “Purdue colleagues are working in close collaboration with their peers at Lilly to develop novel research methods and new technologies that can be immediately deployed into Lilly’s ecosystem.”

Building on this first year of collaboration, Purdue and Lilly will expand the number of funded research projects, finalize shared innovation space in Discovery Park District and broaden participation across additional academic units.

In August, a joint appointment under the Lilly-Purdue 360 Initiative was named. Pavlos Vlachos, professor of mechanical engineering and the St. Vincent Health Professor of Healthcare Engineering at Purdue University, was appointed senior vice president for Device Delivery and Connected Solutions at Lilly. Vlachos, who previously served as director of LPRC, remains as a Purdue faculty member while assuming the senior leadership role at Lilly.

The Lilly-Purdue 360 Initiative supports Purdue’s One Health Initiative, which advances knowledge and innovation related to animal, human and plant well-being through novel interdisciplinary initiatives and partnerships with industry.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research university leading with excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities in the United States, Purdue discovers, disseminates and deploys knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 106,000 students study at Purdue across multiple campuses, locations and modalities, including more than 57,000 at our main campus locations in West Lafayette and Indianapolis. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 14 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its integrated, comprehensive Indianapolis urban expansion; the Mitch Daniels School of Business; Purdue Computes; and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.