MRK vs ORIC

Merck & Company Inc.

Merck & Co., Inc. operates as a healthcare company worldwide. It operates through two segments, Pharmaceutical and Animal Health segments. The Pharmaceutical segment offers human health pharmaceutical products in the areas of oncology, hospital acute care, immunology, neuroscience, virology, cardiovascular, diabetes, and women's health, as well as vaccine products. The Animal Health segment provides discovers, develops, manufactures, and markets a range of veterinary pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and health management solutions and services, as well as a suite of digitally connected identification, traceability, and monitoring products. The company has collaborations with AstraZeneca PLC; Bayer AG; Eisai Co., Ltd.; and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics. It serves drug wholesalers and retailers, hospitals, and government agencies; managed health care providers, such as health maintenance organizations, pharmacy benefit managers, and other institutions; and physicians and physician distributors, veterinarians, and animal producers. The company has collaboration agreement with Gilead Sciences, Inc. to co-develop and co-commercialize long-acting investigational treatment combinations of Lenacapavir and Islatravir in HIV; Amathus Therapeutics to develop treatments for neurodegenerative diseases; and Linnaeus Therapeutics, Inc. to evaluate LNS8801 in combination with KEYTRUDA for patients with advanced cancer. It also has a collaboration with Biomed X Gmbh for building on ongoing research projects in the fields of oncology (DNA damage response and RNA splicing) and autoimmunity (intestinal epithelial barrier in autoimmune diseases); and a collaboration agreement with NGM Biopharmaceuticals, Inc. to focus primarily on the development of novel medicines for unmet patient needs in retinal and CVM diseases, including heart failure. Merck & Co., Inc. was founded in 1891 and is headquartered in Kenilworth, New Jersey.

Oric Pharmaceuticals Inc.

ORIC Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, discovers and develops therapies for treatment of cancers. The company's lead product candidate is ORIC-101, a small molecule antagonist of the glucocorticoid receptor, which has been linked to resistance to multiple classes of cancer therapeutics across various solid tumors. Its other product candidates include ORIC-533, an orally bioavailable small molecule inhibitor of CD73 being developed for resistance to chemotherapy- and immunotherapy-based treatment regimens; ORIC-944, an allosteric inhibitor for prostate cancer; and ORIC-114, a brain penetrant orally bioavailable irreversible inhibitor designed to selectively target epidermal growth factor receptor and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 with high potency towards exon 20 insertion mutations. The company is also developing multiple precision medicines targeting other cancer resistance mechanisms. It has collaboration and license agreement with Astellas Pharma, Inc.; Voronoi, Inc.; and Mirati Therapeutics, Inc. The company was incorporated in 2014 and is headquartered in South San Francisco, California.