1 December 2016 - CEO isn’t interested in big mergers, seeks value in the labs.

Merck & Co. keeps a disciplined approach to drug pricing and is “restrained” when it comes to price hikes, Chief Executive Officer Ken Frazier said Thursday in an interview.

“I’m not saying we’re perfect,” he said Thursday after speaking on a panel at the Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York. “There will always be an individual drug in an individual year that you can point to and say, ‘That looks large in relation to others.’ But if you look at the whole portfolio, you will see that Merck has tended to be rather restrained when it comes to drug prices.”

Speaking earlier on a panel about cancer treatments, Frazier said raising drug prices without any corresponding benefit is a “foolhardy” move for companies. He also said measuring the value of combination therapies to treat cancer is difficult to do since the approach is still in its early stages.

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