California-based Protillion Biosciences, Inc. and Merck (NYSE: MRK) have announced a multi-target drug discovery collaboration and license agreement that gives Merck access to Protillion’s proprietary protein engineering platform across multiple undisclosed therapeutic programs. The deal carries potential milestone payments of up to USD 510 million, making it a material commercial validation for a venture-backed company that has not yet disclosed clinical-stage assets. Protillion is backed by ARCH Venture Partners and Illumina Ventures and was co-founded by CEO Curtis Layton and Stanford University professor Will Greenleaf.
At the center of the agreement is Protillion’s Prot-MaP technology, a megascale data generation platform that produces high-throughput quantitative datasets for training protein design AI systems. The platform uses purpose-built, fully automated instrumentation to characterize millions of protein variants per run, generating what the company describes as just-in-time training sets for AI-driven biologics optimization. The approach is intended to address model overfitting, a known limitation of AI systems trained on sparse or low-diversity datasets. Protillion reports the platform can identify optimized biologics with complex therapeutic profiles — including pH-dependent sweeping and multi-target specificity — that are difficult to achieve through conventional methods. The collaboration is focused on biologics discovery, with Merck contributing its internal drug discovery expertise to advance candidate identification across multiple targets.
Under the terms of the agreement, Protillion will receive an undisclosed upfront payment in addition to eligibility for research, development, and commercial milestone payments totaling up to USD 510 million across multiple programs. The milestone figure excludes the upfront component, making the total potential deal value higher than the disclosed ceiling. No per-program milestone breakdown, royalty structure, territorial carve-outs, or equity component was disclosed. The agreement covers multiple therapeutic targets, though specific indications were not named in the announcement.
The deal follows a period of organizational build-out at Protillion, including the appointment of Robert Hollingsworth as Chief Scientific Officer in March 2026. Hollingsworth brings more than 30 years of drug development experience, most recently as CSO at Shoreline Therapeutics and previously as Vice President and CSO of Cancer Vaccines and Immunotherapeutics at Pfizer. Merck has been a consistent dealmaker in AI-enabled and platform-based drug discovery, having partnered with Quotient Therapeutics on a somatic genomics collaboration for inflammatory bowel disease targets worth up to USD 2.2 billion in March 2026, and with Skyhawk Therapeutics on an RNA-targeting small molecule collaboration for neurological disorders valued at over USD 2 billion in August 2025. Among AI-enabled biologics discovery companies, Absci is perhaps the closest comparator, having built a business around large-scale experimental data generation coupled with generative antibody design. Other players, including Twist Bioscience, provide high-throughput synthetic biology and screening capabilities that support biologics discovery but operate under different business models.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed and edited by the AllSci editorial team Explore more at AllSci News: https://allsci.com/news/