Bill Taranto

Thank you, Jonathan.

Really appreciate you talking to me today and look forward to the conversation.

So the Merkle Health Innovation Fund was established in 2010, as you said, when I came over from Johnson & Johnson and brought some colleagues.

We founded the fund.

And the whole idea for the fund is to really focus on digital and technology.

We're a non-therapeutic fund.

Today, we're a $600 million evergreen fund.

that focuses on what we call pharma services.

And I'll get into that more specifically where we invest.

But the main idea is that we mostly invest in growth companies that are sort of at the crossroads of biotech and health tech.

And our strategy is sort of lean towards platform companies with a proven model and ideally ones that can plug into Merck's global infrastructure or another pharmaceutical company's infrastructure.

The main thing that we do is we build ecosystems of companies whose combined capabilities solve major operational and patient care problems.

So we try to think about use cases that both Merck and the industry are trying to solve, and then how do we use equity in order to solve those?

Above all, our mission is to create both strategic and financial returns by backing really scalable technologies that can transform how BioPharm operates today and even decades from now.

So we're really thinking about

What are the needs today?

But then how does that translate to where the future of the industry is going?

And how do we almost predict where that's going and make investments that can also then provide value?

Maybe not today, but a couple years out as well, as the industry catches up with these types of technologies.

As I said earlier, we focus on what we call pharma services.