AI drug design specialist Protillion Biosciences has inked a $510 million biobucks collaboration and license agreement with Merck & Co. that brings together Protillion\u2019s platform and Merck\u2019s drug discovery expertise.<\/p>\n
Protillion will receive an undisclosed upfront payment, with the potential to earn research, development and commercial milestones tied to the successful development of multiple therapies, according to a June 16 release<\/a>.<\/p>\n The deal is centered around Protillion\u2019s Prot-MaP technology, a data generation platform designed to deliver training sets for protein design AI and enable quantitative analysis of protein libraries. The platform aims to avoid the pitfalls of model overfitting and \u201cenables the identification of optimized biologics with sophisticated therapeutic profiles\u2014such as pH-dependent sweeping and multi-target specificity\u2014that are difficult to achieve with traditional methods,\u201d according to the release.<\/p>\n The Protillion collaboration follows a flurry of deals from the Big Pharma company in March, including a $1 billion partnership<\/a> with Google Cloud that Merck said was aimed at transforming the enterprise.<\/p>\n In March, Merck also signed a $20 million inflammatory bowel disease drug discovery deal<\/a> with Quotient and an $838 million biobucks collaboration<\/a> with Infinimmune to discover antibodies for as-yet-undisclosed targets.<\/p>\n Protillion recently hired Bob Hollingsworth as chief scientific officer as it looks to grow its internal pipeline and strategic partnerships. He most recently served as chief scientific officer at Shoreline Therapeutics and had held scientific leadership roles at Pfizer, GSK and AZ’s MedImmune.<\/p>\n \u201cThis relationship underscores the power of our platform to solve complex protein engineering challenges,\u201d said Curtis Layton, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Protillion Biosciences. \u201cWe are thrilled to work alongside the Merck team to deliver better medicines to patients faster.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI drug design specialist Protillion Biosciences has inked a $510 million biobucks collaboration and license agreement with Merck…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,7548,25,11643,11691,41656,132,1429,41654,10126,41655,41653],"class_list":["post-75941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-ai","tag-ai-and-machine-learning","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-biotech","tag-deals","tag-fierce-biotech-homepage","tag-google","tag-google-ai","tag-infinimmune","tag-merck-co","tag-protillion-biosciences","tag-quotient-therapeutics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}