By AIM · AIM Media House
Merck just signed a multi-target drug discovery collaboration and license agreement with Protillion Biosciences, a California-based biotechnology company specializing in lab-in-the-loop AI drug design.
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.
The collaboration combines Merck's therapeutic development expertise with Protillion's Prot-MaP protein-engineering platform to discover new biologic medicines. The two companies said their first two programs will focus on inflammatory diseases.
The Platform Prot-MaP, short for Protein Display on a Massively Parallel Array, is a megascale data generation platform designed to deliver large training sets to protein design AI systems.
It works by generating tens of millions of clusters of immobilized proteins directly on an Illumina DNA sequencing flow cell, enabling the quantitative analysis of protein libraries and the characterization of millions of variants per run.
The platform can test up to 1 million protein variants simultaneously in a single experiment and generate results in as little as 48 hours. Running multiple platforms in parallel, Protillion says it can scale that output to generate large volumes of experimental data on demand.
Curtis Layton, PhD, CEO and Co-founder of Protillion Biosciences, developed Prot-MaP as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine before founding Protillion in 2019 to commercialize the technology.
"Prot-MaP is a technology platform that allows us to test millions of protein interactions simultaneously, generating an unprecedented amount of data in a matter of days rather than months," Robert Hollingsworth, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer at Protillion, told Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
Continue on AIM Media House