Protillion Biosciences has signed a drug discovery collaboration with Merck to “identify novel therapeutic candidates.” 

The agreement combines Protillion’s proprietary platform, Prot-MaP, with Merck’s expertise in the discovery of novel therapeutic candidates. 

The Prot-MaP technology is a megascale data generation platform, which Protillion says is purpose-built to deliver massive, just-in-time training sets to protein design AI.  

This approach enables the quantitative analysis of protein libraries, characterising millions of variants per run and avoiding the common pitfalls of model overfitting. 

This also facilitates the identification of optimised biologics with sophisticated therapeutic profiles —such as pH-dependent sweeping and multi-target specificity —that are difficult to achieve with traditional methods. 

Under the terms of the agreement, Protillion will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and is eligible to receive research, development, and commercial milestone payments of up to $510 million for the successful development of multiple therapies. 

“Powerful emerging technologies offer the potential to transform the speed and precision with which we characterise protein landscapes and identify novel therapeutic candidates,” said Juan Alvarez, Vice President Discovery Biologics, Merck Research Laboratories.  

“Protillion’s platform offers a compelling opportunity and we look forward to working with the team to advance these programmes.” 

“Merck is a global leader in biopharmaceutical innovation, making them an ideal partner to deploy our technology,” added Curtis Layton, CEO and Co-founder of Protillion Biosciences.  

“This relationship underscores the power of our platform to solve complex protein engineering challenges. We are thrilled to work alongside the Merck team to deliver better medicines to patients faster.”