Merck’s longtime chief departing

Longtime Merck executive Ken Frazier, whose leadership helped bring the drugmaker one of the most lucrative medicines in history and who is one of the few remaining Black chief executive officers of a major corporation, is retiring.

Frazier, 66, Merck’s CEO since 2011, will be replaced by Rob Davis, the chief financial officer since 2014, the company said Thursday as it announced quarterly financial results. Frazier will become executive chairman of the board during a transition period.

Frazier joined Merck, now based in Kenilworth, N.J., in 1992 as general counsel to one of the company’s pharmaceutical businesses and worked his way up to the top job. He is one of the few Black CEOs at the head of a Fortune 500 company.

Last month, when Walgreens named Roz Brewer its new CEO, there were four. With Frazier’s departure, that number is back down to three.

Frazier, a social justice advocate who has won awards from the NAACP and the National Minority Quality Forum, co-founded OneTen, a coalition of organizations committed to training and promoting 1 million Black Americans into family-sustaining jobs.

Frazier helped orchestrate arguably the best deal Merck ever made, its $41 billion acquisition of fellow New Jersey drugmaker Schering-Plough in 2009.

Schering-Plough’s research labs had a hidden gem that, once discovered and developed, became the world’s leading cancer immunotherapy drug, Keytruda.

“None of us were smart enough to know what we had in pembrolizumab,” Keytruda’s chemical name, Frazier said during a conference call with analysts Thursday.

Keytruda now generates $14 billion in annual sales — more than a quarter of Merck’s revenue. It’s approved for dozens of cancer types and patient groups, including two approvals in the fourth quarter, and is being tested in about 1,400 studies for additional uses.