en.Wedoany.com Reported - Merck & Co. has entered into a multi-target discovery collaboration and licensing agreement with artificial intelligence drug design company Protillion Biosciences, aiming to leverage Protillion's "lab-in-the-loop" approach and its Prot-MaP™ chip-based antibody discovery platform to identify multiple novel therapeutic candidates. Under the agreement, Merck will pay Protillion an undisclosed upfront fee, along with research, development, and commercial milestone payments of up to $510 million.
The collaboration aims to combine Merck's expertise in global novel therapy discovery with Protillion's Prot-MaP platform. Prot-MaP, short for "Protein Display on a Massively Parallel Array," quantitatively analyzes protein libraries through a continuous feedback loop between AI and experimental wet lab data, characterizing millions of variants per run to avoid model overfitting. According to Protillion, this method can identify optimized biologics with complex therapeutic properties, such as pH-dependent clearance and multi-target specificity, which are difficult to achieve with traditional approaches. The platform generates tens of millions of immobilized protein clusters directly on Illumina DNA sequencing flow cells through efficient coupled in situ transcription and translation.
Prot-MaP was invented by Protillion CEO and co-founder Curtis Layton and co-founder Dr. Will Greenleaf (Professor of Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine and member of Protillion's Scientific Advisory Board). After earning his Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Duke University, Layton worked under Greenleaf as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Genetics at Stanford School of Medicine. Layton developed Prot-MaP in Greenleaf's lab and subsequently founded Protillion in 2019 to commercialize the technology. Layton's work pioneered a new method for high-throughput probing of biochemical systems, integrating protein engineering, next-generation sequencing technology, molecular biology, in vitro transcription and translation, computational biology, software development, and various engineering disciplines.
Dr. Robert Hollingsworth, Chief Scientific Officer of Protillion, told Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN) that the Prot-MaP platform can simultaneously test millions of protein interactions, generating vast amounts of data in days rather than months. The platform connects high-throughput protein testing with proprietary machine learning models to rapidly identify promising drug candidates, understand their mechanisms of action, and design improved versions. Prot-MaP can test up to one million protein variants in a single experiment and deliver results within 48 hours. Dr. Hollingsworth brings over 30 years of biopharmaceutical experience, having served as Chief Scientific Officer at Shoreline Therapeutics and held positions at Pfizer (as Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer for Cancer Vaccines and Immunotherapy), Pharmacia & Upjohn (later merged into Pfizer), GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), and MedImmune (acquired by AstraZeneca).
Protillion stated that its strategy differs from most companies by not primarily relying on computational predictions of protein structures, but instead directly generating large-scale functional data and identifying the best therapeutic candidates based on real experimental results. By generating millions of protein measurements in parallel, the platform creates the datasets needed to train more powerful machine learning models. According to Layton, Protillion and Merck have already charted a course for the start of the collaboration, with the first two projects focusing on inflammatory disease areas. Layton noted that the capabilities of the Prot-MaP platform extend beyond inflammation, enabling the discovery and development of novel biologics across a wide range of therapeutic areas, with plans to expand into other disease fields in the future.
In recent months, Merck has initiated several technology-focused pipeline collaborations aimed at supplementing its oncology and immunology pipelines to address the impact of patent exclusivity expirations for its blockbuster drugs, including Keytruda® and Gardasil® 9, in the U.S. and other regions. In March, Merck signed a collaboration worth up to $2.2 billion with Quotient Therapeutics to apply its somatic genomics platform to discover new drug targets for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD); that same month, Merck also launched a collaboration with Infinimmune to apply its Anthrobody® discovery platform and GLIMPSE™ antibody language model for antibody candidate development, with milestone payments of up to $838 million. Additionally, Merck has initiated collaborations with Google Cloud, Tempus AI, and the Mayo Clinic.
Dr. Juan Alvarez, Vice President of Discovery Biology at Merck Research Laboratories, stated in a press release that Protillion's platform presents a compelling opportunity and that he looks forward to working with the team to advance these projects. Protillion, headquartered in Carlsbad, California, has grown to 30 employees. The company stated that it is continuing to expand its team and facilities to support its internal pipeline and high-value strategic partnerships. Illumina's venture capital arm, Illumina Ventures, is one of Protillion's investors, having co-led an $18 million funding round with ARCH Venture Partners in 2022. Layton said the company plans to hire six more full-time employees by the end of the year.
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