Merck’s GHI Fund and the Push to Rewire Pharma's Future
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What is the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and its mission?
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Welcome to another episode of Bloomberg Intelligence's Vanguards of Healthcare podcast, where we speak with the leaders at the forefront of change in the healthcare industry. My name is Jonathan Palmer, and I'm a healthcare analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, the in-house research arm of Bloomberg. We're very excited to have Bill Toronto, President and General Partner of the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, joining us today. Bill's been overseeing the fund since its founding in 2010. He previously spent 18 years at Johnson & Johnson, including time in its venture arm, the J&J Development Corp. And in a previous life, he was also an investment banker. Welcome to the podcast, Bill.
Thank you, Jonathan. Really appreciate you talking to me today and look forward to the conversation.
Well, why don't we start at a very high level with, you know, the background behind GHI and where you kind of sit in the venture community?
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. And people always wonder, you know, specifically what that means. And if you think about the pharmaceutical value chain, that's where we focus. And we kind of focus on four big buckets. The first big bucket is discovery and development. It's opportunities to improve drug discovery and accelerate clinical development. This can be assets like AI and ML for drug discovery or target ID. These are novel delivery platforms, things like digital pathology and digital radiology, biomarkers, could be blood-based diagnostics.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and its mission?
0:00–10:58
2
How does GHI Fund invest at the intersection of biotech and health tech?
10:58–20:21
3
What are the four key areas of investment for GHI Fund?
20:21–33:26
4
How does the GHI Fund create ecosystems to solve pharma industry problems?
33:26–51:36
5
What role does AI play in transforming pharma operations?
51:36–54:02
Speakers
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