Over the past three years, MSD has trebled the number of medicines it has in late–stage trials. Chief executive Rob Davis says that he expects to bring as many new treatments to market over the next five years as the company has done in the past decade, the majority of which, he says, have the potential to become blockbuster drugs – medicines bringing in sales of more than $1 billion (€960 million) a year.
That means plenty of work for Samantha Humphreys, who was appointed towards the end of last year to lead MSD Ireland Human Health and to take over as the pharma giant’s top executive in the State.
Ireland is important to MSD. It has eight sites here, including six manufacturing facilities following the acquisition last month of Wuxi’s vaccines plant in Dundalk in a deal valued at €500 million.
The US group spent €1 billion on its first “fully dedicated Keytruda facility” in Swords, in north Dublin in what was, when it was formally opened just over two years ago, the largest financial commitment the company had made for in-house manufacturing. The plant can produce enough of the drug to treat 500,000 patients a year.
Carlow, where the company produces the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, was the group’s first vaccine manufacturing site outside the US.
Unusually, its 3,000-plus manufacturing staff are dispersed around the State – at Ballydine in Co Tipperary, Carlow, Briny in Cork, Swords, Dunboyne in Meath and now Dundalk.
With ongoing expansion across the network – the group has invested close to €7 billion in Ireland over the past 50 years, much of it spent in the past five years – it now employs about 3,200 people in the State and plans to add a further 1,000 jobs over the next 12 months.
I feel incredibly supported by MSD as a company that I’ve been able to take on a role like this, a very new and busy role and I’ll be taking some time away from work
— Samantha Humphreys
Finding a slot in which to talk to Humphreys is tricky, not least as she is heading off on maternity leave later month as she did with each of her two daughters.
“I feel incredibly supported by MSD as a company that I’ve been able to take on a role like this, a very new and busy role and I’ll be taking some time away from work,” she says.
“The company has been amazing and always has been if I’m honest. We have really good policies that support women and men as well in taking the right amount of parental leave for them ... and I think that really speaks to the ethos at MSD and the importance of our people.”
Albeit just 17 years into her career, she is an MSD “lifer”, having joined the company after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in pharmacology.
“I think what sets us apart as a company is both the pipeline and the innovation and the products that we have, but also our culture here at MSD. It is really special, and that is why I joined MSD in the first place as did many of my colleagues. We have a culture here where people tend to stay. People stay for a long time. So, it’s a special place to work.”
She credits her grandfather, a chemist who specialised in polymers, worked in plastics and invented the first adhesive that allowed tailors to stick linings to suits so they do not have to be sewn together, as the inspiration who led to her choice of career.
“He was the one who would always talk to me about the power of discovery and science and the magic of when you plant a seed, how it grows,” she recalls.
“When I was choosing what I would study at university, the appeal of pharmacology really attracted me. It coupled the science and the discovery but also with a more practical element of drug development and how medicines work at the end of the day, which I was always fascinated by.”
Her potential within MSD was spotted early and she was among the first cohort selected for the group’s general management acceleration programme that has seen her experience operations across the breadth of the group’s business.
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For now, her focus is on making the most of its existing portfolio, notably Keytruda – the world’s top-selling cancer drug – and Gardasil, the HPV vaccine at the forefront of global campaigns to reduce cases of cervical cancer in women as well as most cancers of the anus, vagina and vulva and a majority of head and neck cancers.
Between them, the two drugs account for more than half of all sales at MSD which, in North America, is known as Merck.
That brings its own concerns, not least the expiry of key US patents for Keytruda in 2028, and recent challenges for Gardasil in China that have led it to halt shipments to that country. Announced alongside annual results earlier this week, that dented the group’s 2025 outlook and knocked its share price back 11 per cent.
But those are largely concerns for the C-suite. For Humphreys, the job is to manage an operation spanning most of MSD’s areas of clinical speciality, ensuring its smooth function and potential for further expansion.
“If we look at our current portfolio, the biggest areas for us are oncology and vaccines,” concurs Humphreys. “And in both of those areas, we’ve made huge headway here in Ireland and across the world in terms of the number of patients that we can treat and change their lives with the medicines that we make.
Humphreys, along with most Irish-based pharma chiefs, expresses frustration at the ongoing delays in getting medicines that are made in Ireland approved for patients in Ireland
“And that’s still our primary focus, certainly in the human health side of the organisation which I’m leading here, is absolutely to make sure we’re removing barriers, we’re making sure that as many eligible patients as possible receive access to those medicines and those vaccines.”
The issue of barriers crops up several times as we talk.
Humphreys, along with most Irish-based pharma chiefs, expresses frustration at the ongoing delays in getting medicines that are made in Ireland approved for patients in Ireland. Medicines are supposed to be available with 180 days (six months) of securing marketing authorisation from the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
“It’s taking us two years, sometimes even longer, which is an incredibly long amount of time for patients to be waiting for new medicines where there’s the evidence that those treatments are effective in that patient population.
“When it comes to oncology medicines, I think Ireland is ranked 27th out of 36 European countries for how quickly we have access to cancer medicines, which puts us pretty far down the table,” Humphreys says.
“And one of the things in all honesty that we find really hard here is we manufacture these products here and they get shipped to patients all over the world and then there are people in our manufacturing facilities who make the product every day, and if their loved one gets ill with a particular type of cancer which isn’t yet available here in Ireland and they can’t have the medicine, when if you were living in another country in Europe you would, it’s really hard to explain.
“Patients should have access here in Ireland,” she stresses, which takes her to another cause for concern in the local market – the widening gap between people with private health insurance and those without it.
Under pressure from doctors and patients, private health insurers have in recent years taken to approving payment for certain drugs that have been approved by the EMA but are still working their way through the Irish system.
“It’s almost becoming a sort of a two-tier [health service] where you hear clinicians and oncologists certainly talking about it, that they can prescribe a certain medicine to these patients, but the other patients can’t have it.
It is the log-jammed process that frustrates the industry, Humphreys says, rather than the outcomes
“It makes it very hard, I’m sure, for the people prescribing the medicines to be able to give it to a certain number of their patients but not to the remainder, to see the benefit that that medicine can have for their patients and not be able to give it to so many people.”
The Government and the pharmaceuticals industry are working on a new pricing and supply agreement and Humphreys said speed of access is likely to be a priority for the industry this time around.
It is the log-jammed process that frustrates the industry, Humphreys says, rather than the outcomes.
“If you look at the process in Ireland, the final stage, the very final step in that reimbursement process, is the price negotiation,” she says. “And, typically, [for] the majority of medicines that only takes one meeting, which suggests that actually the price, the final hurdle as it were, isn’t necessarily the blocker. It’s the time it takes in the process running up to that that is really the challenge.”
She sees the election of a new Government as a positive, pointing to the number of references in the programme for government on improving access to medicines and making us more competitive with other countries in Europe.
And, of course, there is a fresh start with a new Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, a TD in Humphreys' constituency.
But Humphreys and her team may find themselves focused as much on politics closer to its corporate headquarters in New Jersey than in Dublin.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House comes with baked-in antipathy towards the pharmaceuticals sector and a determination to reduce the United States trade deficit that is expected to see him announce tariffs against EU states, including Ireland, that could hit Big Pharma hard.
He is also waging war on what he sees as “woke” culture, including targeted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes such as the one MSD runs.
To make matters worse, his appointee to the health portfolio, Robert F Kennedy, is a recognised anti-vax campaigner who has been heavily involved in a legal challenge to the safety of MSD’s Gardasil vaccine in the US.
He is also publicly opposed to the use of GLP-1 inhibitors – medicines like Novo Nordisk Ozempic and Wegovy and Ely Lilly’s Mounjaro – for weight loss, something that could chill MSD’s ambitions in an area where it is investing heavily.
“It’s something we’re really watching closely,” Humphreys says of Kennedy’s appointment. “But I think for us as a company globally and it’s equally true here in Ireland, we need to stay true to our purpose which is using cutting-edge science to save and improve lives around the world and vaccines are known to be one of the most cost-effective and significant developments in healthcare around the world in recent times.
In relation to Trump, Humphreys says it is something the company is closely monitoring and ‘getting prepared for’
“Vaccination has made a huge, huge impact on the health of overall populations. MSD’s own vaccines have almost eliminated some very common childhood diseases, like measles, mumps, etc. So, we strongly believe that we need to stay focused on that, continue to spread the message of the effectiveness of vaccines and the importance of vaccines for public health.”
In relation to Trump, Humphreys says it is something the company is closely monitoring and “getting prepared for”.
“No decisions are being made currently but I think like I said at the beginning, Ireland has got a really strong proven history of success in the pharmaceutical industries and that is absolutely the case at MSD. So, I’m confident that the long-standing relationship that we have between Ireland and the US will persist.
And what about DEI?
“I would expect it to remain important for us at MSD. I think it’s been one of the reasons we’ve been successful, and I would expect it to continue to be important.”
“I think our company over time has worked with many different administrations in the US and will continue to do so. And I think for us here in Ireland there may be challenges with particular administrations but, over time, that long-standing relationship between the countries will continue and we will continue to see the investment here in Ireland.”
CV
Name: Samantha Humphreys
Age: 39
Position: Managing director of MSD Ireland Human Health and head of the MSD Ireland country leadership team
Family: Married with two daughters, who are four and two years old.
Outside Interests: “Anything that gets me outside and active, particularly in or on the water ... when I’m not negotiating with my four-year-old or wiping Weetabix off the floor.” She has taken up sea swimming since coming to Ireland and she and her husband also sail regularly.
Something you might expect: Immediately after our interview, she was travelling to Brussels to meet MEPs and officials in an ongoing and intense lobbying effort by companies across the pharma sector against proposals in new EU legislation to water down regulatory protection of data.
Something that might surprise: Humphreys is eight months pregnant “which I think is not typical of a new managing director in a company”.
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