CEO Club Briefing

Partnership

Excerpt from remarks to Boston College Chief Executives Club  

April 12, 2019

TAKEAWAY: Partnership

FRAZIER:
I think we invent medicines that we hope will have value to patients, but we don’t touch the patients. At the end of the day, it’s the physicians who treat the patients. And the academic medical centers play an extremely important role in our society, because not only do they treat people at a very high standard but they’re actually doing the fundamental research that actually moves us forward, that allows companies like Merck to engage in innovation.

So this partnership that we need to have between academic medical centers and companies like Merck are incredibly important. In fact, all of this is part of, in my view, an ecosystem. Academic medical centers, many of the small biotechs that are represented in this room, large pharmaceutical companies, patients, physicians—we all have to work together if we’re actually going to improve not only the quality of health care therapeutically but start to solve some of these really vexing economic questions, because we can’t keep—afford to paying more and more and more for health care.

I said we pay more per capita than other countries do. The fact of the matter is we don’t have better health outcomes than a lot of those countries that pay less. And unless we’re able to work effectively together to ensure that we can bring the best innovation to people and help people to live lives so that they can actually live better and longer, I think we’re just going to continue to go down a rat hole spending more and more money and getting less.

So I want to put a plug in for academic medical centers. I want to put a plug in for NIH. As a society, we shouldn’t treat our academic medical centers as though they are just, in effect, fungible with other institutions, because they have to deliver care, and then they have to do the research, and that costs money. It’s a little bit like my point about pharmaceutical companies. People say to me, you make a ton of money on the drugs in the marketplace now. Well, I invest $10 billion a year in R&D. If I don’t make money on the drugs I have on the market today, then no drugs are going to come in the future. I feel the same way about academic medical centers—people just think they’re there to treat people, but they’re to treat people, they’re there to educate the next generation of physicians, and they’re there to do the research that allows companies like Merck to discover new drugs.