Merck & Co. will use Quotient Therapeutics’ somatic genomics platform to discover novel drug targets in inflammatory bowel disease, in a deal that could generate up to $2.2 billion for the VC-backed startup. Quotient’s approach focuses on mutations that arise in non-reproductive (somatic) cells, aiming to identify causal and protective somatic changes within disease tissue. The collaboration also reinforces Merck’s shift toward data-grounded target discovery, pairing a large-scale somatic database buildout with AI-oriented structuring of disease genomics for downstream drug development. For IBD pipelines, the deal suggests Merck expects actionable signal from tissue-context somatic variation—beyond the inherited germline landscape that has dominated many precision discovery efforts.