Merck is eyeing new immunology deals, chief medical officer...

Merck is eyeing new immunology deals, chief medical officer says: #JPM24
Lei Lei Wu
News Reporter
Merck wants to beef up its immunology pipeline through additional deals, the Big Pharma’s chief medical officer Eliav Barr said at an Endpoints News event on Tuesday.

“We’ll be looking for those immunology opportunities that we think can complement or add a new facet to things,” Barr said.

The big pharma, which houses the best-selling cancer medicine Keytruda, has invested substantially in immunology in recent years, including a $10.8 billion buyout of Prometheus last year. That deal gave Merck an experimental treatment for inflammatory bowel diseases and firmly moved the company into the immunology field.

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“Something that’s underappreciated about the deal was all that was behind it,” Barr said. “It was the biomarker selection strategy, access to this extraordinary annotated database that was really useful, and a lot of early clinical and preclinical candidates.”

Merck has emphasized expanding outside of oncology and Keytruda, focusing in particular on cardiometabolic drugs and immunology.

“Just because we’re really strong in oncology doesn’t give us carte blanche to say we’re always going to be successful in oncology,” Barr said. “If you see the diversification of what we’ve done — and for me that means, whatever the sciences is, is where we’re going to go — if it means building a new immunology franchise, that’s what we’re going to do.”

When asked about Merck’s former head of R&D Roger Perlmutter’s comment to Endpoints that the pharma company had fallen into “franchise thinking,” Barr said that “the ‘we’ve always done it this way’ approach is the killer approach — that kills science. You need to be objective; you need to check your own BS.

“Don’t fall in love with yourself so much. We’re always skeptical about everything that we do,” he said.

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Lei Lei Wu
News Reporter
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