Valo Health Announces Collaboration with Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany to Discover and Develop Novel Treatments for Parkinson’s Disease and Related Disorders

Lex­ing­ton, MA — Novem­ber 20, 2025 — Valo Health, Inc. (“Valo”), a com­pa­ny pio­neer­ing the use of human data and AI to accel­er­ate drug dis­cov­ery and devel­op­ment, today announced a strate­gic col­lab­o­ra­tion with Mer­ck KGaA, Darm­stadt, Ger­many, a lead­ing sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, to advance ther­a­peu­tic dis­cov­ery in Parkinson’s dis­ease and relat­ed dis­or­ders. The part­ner­ship will lever­age Valo’s AI-enabled human causal biol­o­gy plat­form to iden­ti­fy and val­i­date nov­el dis­ease tar­gets and its closed loop dis­cov­ery plat­form to rapid­ly gen­er­ate pre­clin­i­cal com­pounds. The part­ner­ship includes upfront and poten­tial mile­stone pay­ments total­ing up to over 3 bil­lion dol­lars, as well as roy­al­ties and R&D funding.

“Our research engine is focused on deliv­er­ing mean­ing­ful med­i­cines for patients with high unmet med­ical needs. Valo Health’s AI‑enabled plat­forms uti­liz­ing human data will help sharp­en tar­get selec­tion and stream­line drug dis­cov­ery, enabling us to advance the most promis­ing can­di­dates faster,” said Amy Kao, Glob­al Head of Neu­rol­o­gy & Immunol­o­gy Research Unit at Mer­ck KGaA, Darm­stadt, Germany.

Valo’s human causal biol­o­gy plat­form har­ness­es unique access to more than 17 mil­lion de-iden­ti­fied patient records — some span­ning 20 to 30 years — and biobank sam­ples, com­bined with advanced AI, to uncov­er dis­ease pat­terns and pin­point poten­tial tar­gets for ther­a­peu­tic inter­ven­tion. In neu­ro­log­i­cal con­di­tions specif­i­cal­ly, this robust human data has enabled Valo to iden­ti­fy dis­tinct patient phe­no­types across the dis­ease spec­trum, each defined by unique clin­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics that influ­ence pro­gres­sion and reveal areas of unmet need. Using human-val­i­dat­ed tar­gets as a start­ing point, Valo’s closed loop chem­istry plat­form is designed to rapid­ly devel­op and opti­mize small mol­e­cules that are engi­neered to engage these nov­el dis­ease tar­gets.  

“We look for­ward to part­ner­ing with Mer­ck KGaA, Darm­stadt, Ger­many, a leader in devel­op­ing nov­el ther­a­peu­tics for neu­ro­log­i­cal con­di­tions, to expand their pipeline of drug can­di­dates for Parkinson’s dis­ease and relat­ed dis­or­ders,” said Bri­an Alexan­der, MD, MPH, CEO, Valo Health. ​“Start­ing with human causal biol­o­gy in vast amounts of real-world data allows us to unrav­el the com­plex­i­ty of het­ero­ge­neous dis­eases like Parkinson’s and start exper­i­men­ta­tion with human val­i­dat­ed mech­a­nisms, giv­ing us greater con­fi­dence that a tar­get will trans­late into a suc­cess­ful ther­a­peu­tic candidate.”

Valo has a dual approach to ther­a­peu­tic dis­cov­ery: advanc­ing its own pipeline of assets across mul­ti­ple dis­ease areas, while part­ner­ing with phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies like Mer­ck KGaA, Darm­stadt, Ger­many to accel­er­ate pre-clin­i­cal R&D. By inte­grat­ing Valo’s ear­ly R&D capa­bil­i­ties with the clin­i­cal devel­op­ment exper­tise and scale of its phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal part­ners, promis­ing drug can­di­dates can be advanced more effi­cient­ly and deliv­ered to patients, faster. 

About Valo Health:
Valo is redefin­ing drug dis­cov­ery and devel­op­ment through its AI-enabled human causal biol­o­gy and closed loop chem­istry plat­forms. Valo uses AI to under­stand dis­ease causal­i­ty, iden­ti­fy patient sub­types across het­ero­ge­neous dis­eases, and pin­point nov­el drug tar­gets. The com­pa­ny val­i­dates tar­gets using pro­pri­etary 3D engi­neered human tis­sue mod­els that mim­ic mature human phys­i­ol­o­gy and struc­ture. Its closed loop chem­istry plat­form enables rapid devel­op­ment of poten­tial mol­e­cules from tril­lions of start­ing points. Valo’s approach aims to iden­ti­fy more impact­ful drug tar­gets and small mol­e­cule ther­a­peu­tics, faster, and with greater pre­ci­sion than tra­di­tion­al R&D meth­ods. Valo was found­ed by Flag­ship Pio­neer­ing in 2019. Fol­low us on LinkedIn and X. 

Media Con­tact:
Erin Smith
esmith@val­o­health.com