MSD steps out with Protillion in $510m+ AI shindig

MSD has formed a partnership with Protillion Biosciences, worth upwards of $510 million, that will focus on using the AI specialist's 'lab-in-the-loop' platform to discover multiple new therapeutics.

Lab-in-the-loop approaches are gaining traction for AI-powered drug discovery at pharma companies, and rely on the use of algorithms to design novel drug candidates that are tested in wet lab experiments, with results fed back to train the AI models and help them to propose refined candidates for subsequent testing cycles.

Stanford University spinout Protillion is among AI companies that are convinced that, despite advances in AI modelling, drug discovery will continue to rely on ultra-high throughput wet lab technologies, rather than migrating to a purely in silico approach.

The start-up's expertise is built around its Prot-MaP discovery platform, which uses clusters of proteins, immobilised on specialised chips, that allow up to a million candidates to be quantitatively analysed in a single experiment and can generate results in as little as 48 hours, compared to months with conventional approaches. Prot-MaP is aimed particularly at generating antibodies and protein binder candidates.

Chief executive and co-founder Curtis Layton is adamant that lab-in-the-loop is the future for drug discovery, commenting in a social media post recently that the rate-limiting step is not the performance of AI models or architectures, but the availability of "high-quality, actionable data" that needs to be generated in the lab.

The agreement with MSD – known as Merck & Co in the US and Canada – is "validation of a belief that has guided [the] team from the beginning: the future of biologics discovery will depend on [the] ability to generate and learn from large-scale, high-quality experimental protein data," he said.

"While AI continues to transform drug discovery, its success ultimately depends on the quality of the data behind it. At Protillion, we've built our platform to bridge the gap between computational prediction and experimental validation, enabling the rapid engineering of increasingly sophisticated therapeutic proteins."

Under the terms of the agreement, Protillion will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and is in line for "research, development, and commercial" milestone payments of up to $510 million, spread across multiple projects.

"Powerful emerging technologies offer the potential to transform the speed and precision with which we characterise protein landscapes and identify novel therapeutic candidates," said Juan Alvarez, head of discovery biologics at Merck Research Laboratories.

"Protillion's platform offers a compelling opportunity, and we look forward to working with the team to advance these programmes," he added.