Merck & Co. Collaborates with Protillion Biosciences with Up to $ 510M in Milestone Payments

In June 2026, Merck & Co. entered into a partnership with Protillion Biosciences to facilitate the discovery of multiple new therapeutic candidates through a collaboration that may yield up to $510 million in milestone payments for the AI-driven drug design company, which employs a lab-in-the-loop methodology that integrates artificial intelligence with a continuous feedback mechanism from experimental wet-lab data.

The partnership, established through a multi-target discovery collaboration and licensing agreement, aims to combine Merck’s extensive expertise in the discovery of novel therapeutics with Protillion’s Prot-MaP on-chip antibody discovery platform. Prot-MaP, an acronym for Protein Display on a Massively Parallel Array, is designed to enhance the AI-based optimization of therapeutic antibodies through the rapid and precise quantitative analysis of protein libraries, characterizing millions of variants during each experimental run while mitigating the common issue of model overfitting.

The platform is engineered to seamlessly link high-throughput protein testing with proprietary machine learning models, which enables rapid identification of promising drug candidates, elucidation of their mechanisms of action, and the design of enhanced variants. Protillion's Prot-MaP technology enables the simultaneous testing of up to one million protein variants in a single experiment, yielding results typically within a span of 48 hours.

By generating extensive datasets composed of millions of protein measurements in parallel, Protillion asserts that it can develop the large-scale datasets essential for training more potent and predictive machine learning models. These advanced models, in turn, play a critical role in the expedited design and optimization of superior therapeutic candidates with greater accuracy.

Hollingsworth said that Prot-MaP integrates high-throughput experimentation with artificial intelligence. The platform facilitates the rapid generation of data, and the AI component aids in learning from that data, creating a feedback loop that accelerates the discovery of next-generation biologic medications.

Impact on AI in Drug Discovery Industry

The global AI in drug discovery market size is calculated at USD 6.93 billion in 2025 and is expected to increase from USD 7.62 billion in 2026 to approximately USD 17.81 billion by 2035, growing at a CAGR of 9.90% from 2026 to 2035.

According to precedence research, massive R&D investment from private and public sectors enables deep exploration into AI-enabled drug design. A strong ecosystem of biotech incubators and venture capital, supporting agile innovation. Access to large-scale clinical and molecular datasets, helping train more accurate predictive models.

The growth in technological advancement in protein engineering, consulting monoclonal antibody production, recombinant DNA technology, and protein expression systems for the development of protein therapeutics is driving the expansion of the market.

The industry will grow quickly given the technological advancements in AI, significant availability of biomedical data, and the expectation or need for AI leverage for predictive modeling, target identification, and trial protocols across the global ecosystem. In practical terms, Prot-MaP helps us discover and optimize better drug candidates faster, with a level of insight and precision that has not previously been possible at this scale.

Impact on Protein Therapeutics Industry

The global protein therapeutics market size was estimated at USD 401.97 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow from USD 430.59 billion in 2026 to approximately USD 793.70 billion by 2035, expanding at a CAGR of 7.04% from 2025 to 2035.

According to precedence research, technological advancements in biotechnology, including recombinant DNA technology, protein engineering, and cell culture techniques, are boosting the development of novel protein therapeutics with improved efficacy, specificity, and safety profiles. Academic institutions, research organizations, and biotechnology companies are actively engaged in research and development activities.

Protillion said that Prot-MaP is intended to allow the engineering of novel biologics by generating large-scale, just-in-time quantitative antibody binding datasets for protein design AI. The platform allows the generation of tens of millions of clusters of immobilized proteins directly on an Illumina DNA sequencing flow cell through efficient tethered in situ transcription and translation.

About Company

Merck & Co.

Merck & Co., Inc., headquartered in Rahway, New Jersey, is an American multinational pharmaceutical enterprise. The company operates as Merck Sharp & Dohme or MSD outside the United States and Canada and is ranked fifth among the largest biomedical companies by revenue. Merck offers prescription medications across various therapeutic areas, including oncology, vaccines, infectious diseases, cardio-metabolic disorders, immunology, neuroscience, and ophthalmology, as well as a broad array of veterinary pharmaceuticals, health management solutions, and identification, traceability, and monitoring products. The company maintains manufacturing facilities across North America, South America, Western Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Protillion Biosciences

Protillion Biosciences, founded in 2019 by David Walt, Curtis Layton and Will Greenleaf, is based in California, United States. The company operates as a biotechnology firm focused on advancing the design and development of protein-based drugs through the enhancement of traditional methodologies. Protillion Biosciences aims to accelerate the selection of protein-based drug candidates while improving their potential for clinical success. The organization has developed a novel, powerful protein display platform intended to revolutionize existing approaches to protein-based drug design and development.