Merck & Co. launched an AI drug discovery collaboration with Protillion Biosciences that could pay up to $510 million in milestone payments, anchored on Protillion’s “lab-in-the-loop” antibody discovery platform. Protillion’s Prot-MaP technology is designed to generate high-throughput binding datasets by producing and quantifying massive protein variant libraries. Merck’s stated role focuses on leveraging its therapeutic discovery expertise to identify new candidates. The structure suggests the partnership is aimed at shortening the feedback cycle between computational design and experimental validation, reducing the risk of model overfitting by validating against measured binding profiles. For biotech leaders, the deal reinforces how large pharma is scaling AI-enabled wet-lab experimentation into formal discovery pipelines rather than treating AI as purely in-silico.