Pharmaceutical company MSD has partnered with Imperial to reveal insights that will aid its mission to support clinicians and save and improve lives.

The multinational, known in the USA as Merck, has become a new member of Imperial Business Partners (IBP), a service that provides industry partners with curated access to the best of Imperial’s expertise, innovations and resources.

This partnership is a key resource to enable our teams to think beyond their horizons Dr Dilruwan Herath Executive Medical Affairs Director, MSD

The partnership will look beyond drug discovery and development – which is often the focus of the pharmaceutical industry’s collaborations with academia – to explore ways that academic expertise can support multiple stages of the pharmaceutical value chain.

An initial focus will be medical affairs, a field that links the pharmaceutical industry with the wider medical community. MSD medical affairs professionals will use IBP’s support to connect with Imperial experts who can help the company gain new insights into patient needs, break down barriers to health equality, and get better data on population health to tackle preventable disease. These efforts will be designed to help MSD serve the medical community and improve patient outcomes.

The partnership will draw on Imperial strengths in areas such as data science and public health, and resources such as the large sets of data that the College has access to. It will also make use of Imperial’s expertise in medical education, and the organisations are exploring an initiative around the training of medical professionals.

The initial focus on medical affairs illustrates our capacity to support the pharmaceutical industry with more than just drug discovery and development, and reflects our and MSD’s shared mission to uncover new insights that can ultimately improve patient care. Dr Simon Hepworth Director of Enterprise, Imperial

As part of the partnership MSD has already collaborated with academics to address goals aligned to their public health initiatives and contributed to a briefing on the use of artificial intelligence at multiple stages of the pharmaceutical value chain.

MSD’s Executive Medical Affairs Director, Dr Dilruwan Herath, said: “This partnership is a key resource to enable our teams to think beyond their horizons and deliver solutions which will impact our patients. Imperial have a wealth of offerings and their expertise is invaluable to us as we strive to ensure the outcomes for patients are maximized, with inequalities challenged”

Dr Simon Hepworth, Imperial’s Director of Enterprise, said: “I’m delighted MSD are joining us as new members of Imperial Business Partners and welcome their contribution to the networks we coalesce between academics, clinicians, and professionals from industry and government. The initial focus on medical affairs illustrates our capacity to support the pharmaceutical industry with more than just drug discovery and development, and reflects our and MSD’s shared mission to uncover new insights that can ultimately improve patient care.”