Amgen has entered into a research collaboration agreement with Generate Biomedicines to discover and create protein therapeutics for five clinical targets across several modalities.

The partnership aims to develop new drugs with predictable manufacturing and clinical behaviour.

Under the deal, Amgen will make an upfront investment of $50m for the first five programmes, along with an option to collaborate on up to five more programmes, at additional cost.

The company will pay up to $370m in future milestones as well as royalties for each programme from the pact, with a total potential transaction value of $1.9bn.

Amgen’s biologics drug discovery expertise will be combined with Generate’s machine learning-enabled technology platform to discover and create protein therapeutics.

Amgen Research and Development executive vice-president David Reese said: “We are now at a scientific hinge point, where computational approaches can advance our knowledge of biology and further drive our ability to design the right molecule for some of the most challenging targets.

“We believe Generate Biomedicine’s integrated in silico design and wet lab capabilities combined with Amgen’s strength in protein engineering can accelerate our drug discovery efforts, generating novel protein sequences with optimal therapeutic properties.”

The company stated that Generate’s machine learning algorithms analyse proteins and look for statistical patterns connecting amino acid sequence, structure and function.