Eli Lilly licensed Seamless Therapeutics’ recombinase gene editing platform in a collaboration worth up to roughly $1.12 billion to develop precision genetic medicines for hearing loss. The pact grants Lilly exclusive rights to programmed recombinases designed to insert or correct sequences independent of host repair pathways, accelerating a non‑nuclease editing approach into preclinical and clinical development. Seamless, a TU Dresden spinout, will design and evolve recombinases for Lilly’s target loci using high-throughput evolution workflows; Lilly will fund downstream development and commercialization. Company statements emphasize the platform’s capacity for large, site‑specific insertions and the potential to address mutations that are hard to target with standard CRISPR-based approaches. The agreement continues a wave of big‑pharma commitments to next‑generation genetic medicines and illustrates pharma’s willingness to pay for alternative editing modalities that may offer different safety or payload advantages.