Takeda expanded its multi‑year collaboration with AI protein design specialist Nabla Bio by signing a second research agreement to discover AI‑designed proteins. The deal extends a partnership that began three years ago and underscores large pharma’s continued interest in computationally engineered biologics. Separately, a field‑level paper outlined how advances in AI for protein engineering are setting new benchmarks for sequence‑to‑function prediction and design validation. The combined developments signal faster design cycles, higher throughput hit finding and an accelerating move from in silico candidates to wet‑lab validation. Pharma partners see AI protein design as a route to novel modalities and to shorten lead optimization timelines, but companies will monitor experimental success rates and IP pathways as computational pipelines scale.