Merck and Protillion launched an AI drug discovery collaboration that can generate up to $510 million in milestone payments, combining Merck’s therapeutic discovery capabilities with Protillion’s Prot-MaP on-chip antibody discovery platform. Prot-MaP is intended to feed iterative “lab-in-the-loop” optimization with quantitative binding data for many antibody variants. The partnership signals continued industry confidence that AI-enabled wet-lab cycles can generate actionable design candidates—particularly for biologics where library sizes and binding characterization are bottlenecks. For the sector, the terms also illustrate how AI platforms are increasingly monetized through milestone-heavy licensing structures tied to downstream development progress.