Merck & Co., Inc.

Good morning. My name is Mary Sarah and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Merck & Co. Second Quarter 2021 Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press the star then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your questions, press the pound key. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Peter Denenbaum, VP, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Mary, and good morning. Welcome to Merck's second quarter 2021 conference call. With me today are Rob Davis, our Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Dean Lee, President of Merck Research Labs, Frank Clyburn, President of Human Health, and Caroline Litchfield, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I'd like to point to a few items. you will see that we have items in our GAAP results, such as acquisition-related charges, restructuring costs, and certain other items. You should note that we have excluded these from our non-GAAP results and provided reconciliation in our press release. I would like to remind you that some of the statements that we make during today's call may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provision of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are made based on the current beliefs of Merck's management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. If our underlying assumptions prove inaccurate or uncertainties materialize, actual results may differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. Our SEC filings, including item 1A in the 2020 10-K, identify certain risk factors and cautionary statements that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from those projected in any of our forward-looking statements made this morning. Merck undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements. Our SEC filings, today's earnings release, and an investor presentation with highlights of our results are all posted on Merck.com. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Ron. Thanks, Peter, and good morning, everyone.

I'm deeply honored to speak to you today in my new role as CEO. Merck is a special company, and I'm fortunate to be surrounded by talented and dedicated colleagues who are intently focused on bringing important life-enhancing and life-saving medicines and vaccines to people and animals around the world. This longstanding and unwavering commitment to our mission is real, is tangible and is what drives us to perform every day. The prioritization of investment in research and development under Ken's leadership and the focus of resources behind Key Growth Drivers has put us in a position of strength that I intend to build upon. As I consider Merck's future, I continue to believe investment in research and development with patients at the center of everything we do is core to who Merck is and is our best path to sustainable ongoing success and value creation. However, how we go about both delivering the best external and internal scientific opportunities, as well as how we bring those innovations to patients must evolve. As I transitioned to the role of CEO, I solicited candid feedback from colleagues and external stakeholders. What I heard reaffirms my convictions. There's broad agreement that investment in R&D should remain our highest strategic priority. Employees are confident that we're on the right path. We have rebuilt and reinvigorated our discovery research engine and have a growing and robust pipeline. We're successfully executing on clinical development and we're delivering strong commercial growth across both our human and animal health businesses now and will continue to do so well into the future. While we are on the right path, We need to work with more speed, urgency, and agility, more closely matching the pace of change in the broader environment. We need to accelerate the delivery of our innovations to the patients who need them and to be leaner, nimbler, and more digitally enabled. We need to leverage the scale and reach we have as a global biopharmaceutical leader while also embracing a commitment to evolve to address new challenges. And we need to move with focus and intentionality. which is a priority for both me and my management team. I know that it's not about promising, it's about performing. Actions speak louder than words. With that understanding, I pledge to do all I can to ensure that Merck remains a global biopharmaceutical leader long into the future, delivering value to current and future patients and growth and value for our shareholders. Now, turning to the quarter. We have very good performance with strong growth. Our results demonstrate that the impact of the pandemic on our business is lessening. Patient access to healthcare providers has improved, and we expect continued strong growth in the remainder of the year. We're also making meaningful clinical advancements, which Dean will speak to in just a few moments. Our seamless execution during a period in which we successfully completed a complex spinoff without business interruption underwent leadership transitions and delivered accelerated growth only increases my confidence in what our organization can achieve in the future. Organon is now an independent company, an important milestone in our company's history. And this transaction is a meaningful catalyst to Merck becoming a more focused, more efficient, and faster growing company. Let me spend a moment speaking about Petruta, which again experienced very strong growth this quarter. I'm confident that Keytruda will continue to be a foundational cancer therapy and achieve strong growth for years to come. We are a leader in immuno-oncology and are determined to leverage this and to sustain success. We are rapidly advancing a diverse set of oncology assets, many of which we highlighted in our recent ASTHO industrial presentation. Across our oncology portfolio, we expect over 90 potential new indications by 2028, more than tripling our current base. We have a wide array of clinical partnerships providing valuable insights into the biology of disease and into important potential external innovation. With our expanding oncology portfolio outside of CATRUDA, we will extend our leadership in cancer long into the future. I also strongly believe we will successfully navigate the eventual CATRUDA loss of exclusivity given the breadth of opportunity in areas both within as well as outside of oncology. Internally, our leaders are intensely focused on this period, and efforts are underway. Externally, I understand the importance of providing investors with increased transparency into the breadth of opportunities we see in our pipeline that will help us do this. As we've done recently in highlighting is Latravir, our broader HIV portfolio and our next-generation oncology assets, We are planning deep dive investor events with our scientific and commercial leaders focused on other areas of our pipeline that we believe are underappreciated, yet hold great promise, such as our suite of vaccine candidates, our cardiometabolic assets, as well as others. Business development plays an important role, and we are putting increased emphasis on ensuring we are appropriately aggressive in accessing the best external science. Executing value-enhancing BD is a top priority, and we intend to add to our pipeline through acquisitions, partnerships, licensing deals, and collaborations. We will be unbounded by therapeutic area, though we are mindful of the need to have a balanced portfolio over time. We'll seek new products, modalities, and platforms that allow us to establish beachheads in important areas. Our recent acquisition of Pandion and its potentially foundational immunology asset is a good example of this. we will look at both early and late stage opportunities, and we have the financial flexibility to consider deals of all sizes, particularly given the $9 billion distribution from the Organon spinoff. And given our strong operational momentum, we are most interested in transactions that are easily integrated and less disruptive, where value is principally derived by the introduction of innovative new products that address patient needs instead of through cost synergies. Before I turn the call over to Frank to discuss second quarter performance in our human health business, I want you to know that I appreciate and applaud the increasing societal and investor demands on corporations to act responsibly. In fact, I believe our strong performance across environmental, social, and governance issues has and will continue to create sustainable value for all of our stakeholders. Merck has a long record and history of strong corporate citizenship. and I'm committed to remaining a leader in this area. With that, let me turn the call over to Frank.