Merck & Co.

I know things have been super busy at Infinimune.

We'll probably get on, rightly so, to the recent milestones, the Series A, the Merck deal, the plans for 27 in a little while.

But I think it may be useful for those tuning in Just going back a little bit to your entry into biotech, which is pretty recent.

I checked it out, obviously, 2019, starting out in computational biology at 10x.

Yeah, no, we have a, you know, I think Infinimune, like many biotech companies before us, we have benefited from having diversified capital support the company.

And that includes our earliest supporters from the sort of West Coast tech bio community.

That includes family offices that have... joined along the way, strategic support from Merck and now in the form of a co-lead from the venture arm of Regeneron, as you mentioned, and now biotech specialists such as RA Capital and Forge Life Science Partners, and then high-tech generalists such as Goldcrest Capital and Godfrey Capital.

And I think that's important to highlight because you learn something from each of those different groups they optimize for different things and it also helps you have a more fulsome conversation in your boardroom and helps you really cover your bases around what is actually special about your company and what are the features that many different audiences will think about versus you know sort of zoning in on like well We're going to talk asset talk just like every other biotech company.

And all we're doing is saying you don't have to pay any tariff at all.

Do you know that we have now 19 medical plants, Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer? They're all building plants in the United States.

Kind of a backhanded, kind of a backhanded, you got it.

You don't get business, but you got this tariff stuff, Laura.

Virginia just in the last year has announced three of the largest advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing projects in the entire country.

AstraZeneca, Merck, and Eli Lilly are all doing major projects in Virginia that have been announced in the last year.

You're gonna see more of that activity as life-saving drugs come to market.

And you're also going to see, I think, a lot more investment in the country's AI infrastructure, its energy infrastructure.

And you're going to start to find companies, pharmaceutical sales companies.

Now, there's something I want to shout out right away that, yes, there's advantages and disadvantages to working for the biggest companies, okay? GSK, Pfizer, Merck, Roche, Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, huge pharmaceutical companies, right? And working for those companies is a great thing.

So let me do it that way.

Let me tell you why it's great and why it might not be so great.

So we just had a little bit of a heavy conversation about some of the safety side effects we're seeing from new medicines.

Let's talk about something that was exciting that really grabbed the industry's attention, which was Merck and Moderna's kind of surprise success in a way.

Merck and Moderna have been working on a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, and they announced a couple of weeks ago that that it actually slowed the return of melanoma and it spread to other parts of the body in a late-stage clinical trial.

Now, that all came from a press release.

That's about all the information that we have.

But these results sent Moderna stock through the roof.

And have renewed the hope and optimism, I would say, around mRNA, which is a type of treatment that we all became familiar with during COVID.

But there has since been a bit of backlash around this new cancer vaccine data from Merck and Moderna turned the tide a little bit and brought back some of that excitement.

Excited to have you all here.

We have the first in the building, first AVP of Health Equity at Merck, Ms. Marianne Ettinger.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

And we are at the Cancer Care Summit.

And we have had a great time talking about why it's important to increase quality health care in underserved communities.

And I would love to learn more about why it was important for Merck to be represented in this conversation today.

Well, thank you so much, Queen Star, for inviting me.

Yeah, I know.

But Doc, you got to look at, you know, originally who made the first vitamin? Merck Pharmaceuticals.

The pharmaceutical industry does not do anything that benefits your health ever.

But their wet dream, sorry to be so crass, is to get it into the fortification market because then the government requires your little batch of chemicals that you can buy it by the ton with your checking book into the milk supply, into the grains, into cereals, pastas, and Starbucks is looking to fortify their coffee beans

He's done some startups.

He's served as chief scientist and executive committee member at GE Healthcare following its acquisition of a company he was involved with Amersham Biosciences, advised senior executive leadership at major pharmaceutical enterprises, including Genentech, Merck, and currently leads the Healthcare Advisory Board of Arsenal Capital Partners, while serving also as a senior advisor at Celesta.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jim Rothman.

So, uh, one of those things that Jim has done as, uh, as I mentioned was win a Nobel prize.