Merck & Co. is expanding AI-powered biologics discovery through a multi-target collaboration and license with Protillion Biosciences, a move that could generate up to $510 million in milestone payments. The deal centers on Protillion’s Prot-MaP on-chip antibody discovery platform, designed to generate large, quantitative binding datasets for optimizing therapeutic antibodies. Prot-MaP couples immobilized protein library generation directly on an Illumina DNA sequencing flow cell with “lab-in-the-loop” feedback from experimental wet-lab data. Merck will apply its global therapeutics discovery capabilities alongside Protillion’s platform to identify and optimize multiple therapy candidates. For biotech operators, the structure reinforces a broader shift toward AI systems that are tightly coupled to high-throughput experimentation, rather than purely model-driven design.