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TRENTON, N.J. – The new Merck & Co. has become the world’s second-biggest drugmaker overnight with a huge acquisition, but it still has a fat wallet and plans more wheeling and dealing.
A day after closing its $41.1 billion purchase of longtime joint venture partner Schering-Plough Corp., Merck already was looking to increase the number of acquisitions and licensing deals it does, Chief Executive Richard Clark said Wednesday. The company has averaged 50 deals a year since 2003.
Clark said Merck is looking to make deals with “biotech companies that have first or best-in-class products that can build our franchises.”
It has about $8 billion in cash and investments to spend.
Wall Street liked the Schering deal, pushing Merck shares up $1.97, or 6.4 percent, to end at $32.64 Wednesday, which made it the top gainer that day among the components of the Dow Jones industrial average.
“We’ve got a tremendous pipeline, with 15 late-stage candidates,” Clark said.
Between those drugs and future deals, Merck is focusing on several areas, including its longtime strengths such as cardiovascular disease – with four new drugs in testing – and vaccines, adding Schering-Plough’s experimental shot to prevent staph infections to Merck’s array of standard child and adult vaccines.
Other targets are osteoporosis medicines, such as a Merck drug to replace its pioneering Fosamax, which has lost sales to generic competition, and women’s health, as Schering makes contraceptive and fertility drugs.
Merck was the world’s top-selling drugmaker in the mid-1990s, but Pfizer took the lead in 1998 when it launched an overnight success, impotence pill Viagra.
