William Taranto moved to US-based pharmaceutical group Merck more than three years ago as the group made a push into nonpharmaceutical healthcare and wanted a leader to be managing director of its new Global Health Innovation Fund.
The fund is off to a running start, having already deployed its initial $250m tranche, and being awarded a further $250m tranche last year.
Taranto, executive director at the office of innovation in Merck, said: “The biggest change in 2013 for the Global Health Innovation [GHI] Fund, is our movement into bigger deals through private equity as well as mergers and acquisitions. We are doing bigger deals with private equity and other strategic partners. In addition, the GHI Fund recently acquired Physician Interactive, and will be completing two additional acquisitions by year end. In addition, we have been expanding our investment focus to include new areas of health information technology – cloud, security and privacy – as well as expanding our investments in technology enabled care.”
He added: “Most pharmaceutical manufacturers rarely look beyond the pill and invest outside their core business. Merck was very interested in being the best healthcare company in the world and that entailed creating a venture firm that would allow Merck to look beyond the pill and give them optionality around the future. I came to Merck in April of 2010 and recruited a team of venture experts in the adjacency healthcare space that are very good at what they do.”
Taranto, who came to Merck from a similar role at Johnson & Johnson and after a degree from Saint Bonaventure University, said: “I spent 18 years at Johnson & Johnson with the last 10 years in a group called health care strategy and development, which was different from the Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation. The group looked at the future of healthcare, three to five years out, and developed strategies and investments to prepare for that eventual future.”
He added: “It was great to come into a company like Merck and start from scratch, creating not only our strategy but our investment thesis and placing 20 investments in a rapid period of time.
We are shaping healthcare in what we are doing with these investments, and being part of Merck is an integral piece of what we do”.
What is the future of your sector?
Taranto said: “Healthcare continues to grow and provide endless opportunities, especially around big data. We have a belief that data will be the currency in healthcare, and that better use of this data will improve the quality of health care while lowering system costs. This thesis is the foundation for our investment strategy.
He added: “Merck GHI invests broadly in digital health with a specific focus in three main areas – personalised medicine (molecular diagnostics and point-of-care diagnostics); big data (informatics and integration); and technology enabled care (remote monitoring and flexible access to care). Better use of data to improve the quality of healthcare while lowering system costs typically has universal appeal.”
