Merck & Co., Inc.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Merck & Company Q1 Sales and Earnings Conference Call. At this time, while participants are in a listen-only mode, until the question and answer session of today's conference. At that time, to ask a question, press star 1 on your phone and record your name at the prompt. This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Peter Dannenbaum, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, or you may begin.

Thank you, Shirley, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Merck's first quarter 2024 conference call. Speaking on today's call will be Rob Davis, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Caroline Litchfield, Chief Financial Officer, and Dr. Dean Lee, President of Merck Research Labs. Before we get started, I'd like to point out 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 provide a reconciliation in our press release. I would like to remind you that some of the statements that we make today 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 and the 2023 10-K, identify certain risk factors in 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. During today's call, a slide presentation will accompany our speaker's prepared remarks. These slides, along with our earnings release, today's prepared remarks, and our SEC filings are all posted to the investor relations section of Merck's website. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Rob.

Thanks, Peter. Good morning, and thank you for joining today's call. We've begun 2024 with continuing momentum in our business. We're harnessing the power of innovation to advance our deep pipeline and are maximizing the impact of our broad commercial portfolio for the benefit of patients. We drove strong growth across key therapeutic areas, executed strategic business development, and are now launching a significant new product in the cardiometabolic space while also preparing for the potential approval and launch of two additional important candidates in vaccines and oncology. We have significant opportunities ahead of us across all areas of our business, and we're highly focused on realizing them. I continue to be inspired by the dedication of our talented global team, which is working tirelessly to bring differentiated medicines and vaccines to patients through seamless scientific, commercial, and operational execution. In March, we received FDA approval for Winrevere, a first-in-class treatment for adults with pulmonary arterial hypertension, a rare progressive and ultimately life-threatening disease. This marks the achievement of a significant milestone for our company. It exemplifies the value of our strategic priorities and demonstrates how our enduring commitment to our purpose is resulting in tangible benefits for patients. Just over two years since adding Winrevere to our pipeline, our attention now turns to the execution of a strong commercial launch where we have already seen prescriptions being written. We see a tremendous opportunity to positively impact the lives of people living with PAH. And further, the importance of this therapy to patients provides us with increased confidence in our ability to deliver sustainable long-term value for our shareholders. Strategic business development focused on the best external science remains an important priority for our company. We've demonstrated that we can leverage our deep discovery prowess to identify important acquisition targets and then add significant value through our powerful clinical research engine, our regulatory expertise, and our commercial scale, which together can serve to accelerate development and enable broad global access to important medical discoveries for patients in need. Turning to our first quarter results, we achieved strong growth, reflecting robust demand for our innovative portfolio. We're pleased to reflect this momentum in our updated full-year guidance, which Caroline will speak to in a moment. Turning to our broader research efforts, we're focused on advancing our expansive and diverse pipeline of leading-age programs for the benefit of patients. In vaccines, we continue to pioneer new approaches to optimize disease prevention. In HPV, we're building on the foundation set by Gardasil to further reduce the global burden of certain HPV-related cancers, and disease by potentially providing broader protection with a new multivalent HPV vaccine. And by generating data to clearly demonstrate whether or not a single dose of Gardasil 9 provides comparable long-term protection to the approved three-dose regimen in males and females ages 16 to 26. In pneumococcal, we presented additional compelling data for V116, a vaccine that is specifically designed to help protect against the majority of invasive pneumococcal disease in adults ages 65 and older and look forward to its potential approval in June. Each of these programs are platforms where we can provide meaningful protection to broad populations on a global scale. In HIV, in partnership with Gilead, we shared promising data from our revitalized program for a once-weekly combination of islotravir and Lenacapavir in the treatment setting. We're actively progressing our comprehensive clinical program, which is focused on both treatment and prevention strategies to meet the evolving needs of the HIV community. And in oncology, we initiated several late stage programs of novel candidates from our diverse pipeline as we work to expand our impact for patients and reinforce our leadership position over the long term. Finally, across our deep pipeline, we have significant clinical momentum in a range of therapeutic areas. Cutting-edge science is at the core of who we are, and I'm confident that Merck is well positioned to deliver the next wave of important innovations and value to patients, shareholders, and to all of our stakeholders. In summary, our science-led strategy is delivering compelling proof points that we are creating a sustainable innovation engine that, with continued clinical success, will lead to a more diversified portfolio of growth drivers over the next decade and beyond. I again want to recognize the enormous efforts across our global organization. My confidence is strong and growing that we are well positioned to build on this momentum and drive patient impact and value creation this year and well into the future. With that, I'll turn the call over to Caroline.