BigHat Biosciences, Inc. announced a collaboration with Merck, to apply the company's technology to design candidates for up to three drug discovery programs. BigHat's design platform, Milliner, integrates a high-speed characterization with ML technologies to engineer antibodies with more complex functions and better biophysical properties. This approach could help reduce the difficulty of optimizing antibodies and other therapeutic proteins. Under the collaboration, BigHat and Merck will collaborate to optimize up to three proteins by leveraging BigHat's platform to synthesize, express, purify, and characterize molecules.

The teams have initiated work on the first program and are looking forward to using the power of the complementary skills sets within each research team to generate high-quality lead antibodies.