William Taranto has seemingly moved heaven and earth since he moved to US-based pharmaceutical group Merck six years ago as the group made a push into non-pharmaceutical healthcare.
The Global Health Innovation Fund (GHI) under his leadership has grown quickly to a $500m pool and it has in 2014 added a $700m private equity fund, although the company’s MRL Ventures founded last year is separately managed. GHI completed six new deals and nine follow-on deals for the year and returned more than $100m in capital to Merck, Taranto said.
For his future plans, he said: “We are focused on using our growth equity firm to create ecosystems around oncology and infectious disease.”
Taranto , who is inaugural co-chairman of the planned industry trade body, came to Merck from a similar role at Johnson & Johnson, where he worked with Joe Volpe.
Volpe then moved over to Merck to rejoin Taranto and has been general manager of Merck’s $700m private equity fund as well as a managing director of GHI.
In his nomination for Volpe’s GCV Rising Stars 2016 award, Taranto said: “Joe Volpe has been instrumental in co-developing and leading our transformation from a simple corporate venture firm into one that executes on venture capital, growth equity and M&A.
“He was recently put in charge of our growth equity company because he has shown extraordinary capabilities in building out the ecosystem strategy I have implemented at Merck Global Health Innovation. He is not just a rising star. He is a star.”
On the private equity side, he added: “We are very proud to have acquired and merged Preventice Solutions and eCardio then bringing in Boston Scientific as our partner.”
After a merger with ECardio and a spin out after acquisition, Volpe said the Preventice asset deal paid Merck back more than 80% of what was invested and left it still owning approximately 48% of the asset with significant value.
For this deal and the remote patient-monitoring thesis that underpinned it, Volpe won his second divisional award at Merck. This thesis was one of three ecosystem strategies he devised and put into effect with the others in healthcare information technology and physician-patient engagement anchored by the Physicians Interactive platform.
In last year’s Symposium, Heidi Mason, managing partner of advisory service Bell Mason Group, spoke to Taranto and Donato Tramuto, entrepreneur and founder of Physicians Interactive, the healthcare marketing company acquired by Merck.
Tramuto commented that while it had been successful in moving the Merck asset over to Physicians Interactive, it had taken a year and a half. He described it as “like moving Cleopatra down the Nile”.
He added: “When you are looking for a corporate partner it is not a question of what they are doing in corporate venturing, but why. Merck was fundamentally committed to the ecosystem.”
Taranto has a degree from Saint Bonaventure University, named after a medieval philosopher who attempted to integrate faith and reason. This seems appropriate as, in a corporate venturing context, Merck under Taranto has attempted to look at the continuum of healthcare.
As Taranto said at the 2014 GCV Symposium: “In the context of what I do for a living, if you look at the continuum of healthcare from pre-diagnosis to death, the question for Merck was: how do we participate in that continuum where the pill or the vaccine makes up only one piece of healthcare?…
“We then decided that venture capital was the best way for Merck to do that. It allows them to look at the future of healthcare, take bets on a number of different areas and then, if it fits strategically and financially, it becomes an option for them to acquire those companies.”
Merck’s investment activity since the beginning of 2015
