Merck and Protillion Biosciences launched a multi-target AI drug discovery collaboration with potential milestone payments of up to $510 million, pairing Protillion’s Prot-MaP on-chip antibody discovery platform with Merck’s therapeutics discovery capabilities. The deal is designed to generate large, quantitative antibody-binding datasets for AI optimization of therapeutic profiles. The same theme is echoed in Isomorphic Labs’ $2.1 billion Series B, one of biotech’s largest funding rounds, aimed at scaling its Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine (IsoDDE). The company says IsoDDE improved predictive accuracy across multiple protein–ligand tasks, reinforcing how capital is concentrating around “lab-in-the-loop” AI discovery engines. Together, the announcements underscore that major pharmas are funding AI discovery where dataset generation and binding-optimization loops are central, while AI-first platforms are raising at unprecedented levels to expand compute and experimental iteration speed.