Merck Does Something. Or Not. Maybe Something Else Instead.

There's some Merck news today, via FiercePharma. First off, their R&D head Roger Perlmutter sat down with some of the most prominent analysts for a chat about the company's direction - and they came out with two completely different stories. Big changes? Minor ones? I wonder if people were taking away what they wanted to hear to confirm what they'd already decided Merck should be doing. Seamus Fernandez, for example, apparently came away saying that he thought a major R&D restructuring was inevitable, but that's what he thought before he sat down. This sort of thing is worth keeping in mind when you hear some Wall St. types (particularly on the "sell side") going on authoritatively about what's happening inside a given company. The other news is that Merck is handing off one of their oncology programs (the WEE-1 kinase inhibitor MRK-1775) to AstraZeneca. If I were a mean person given to saying unkind things, I'd say that this drug is at least now going to get a lot more money spent on it, because that's what AZ has been famous for. But I'll stick with what John Carroll had to say on Twitter: "So if $MRK thought 1775 was any damn good, would they outlicense it to $AZN?"
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs