Ken Frazier, Merck CEO (Bess Adler/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Gilead, Mer­ck put aside ri­val­ry to chal­lenge Glax­o­SmithK­line for long-act­ing HIV meds

Joan But­ter­ton was sit­ting 30,000 feet above the At­lantic, fly­ing to a con­fer­ence in Eu­rope, when the Mer­ck sci­en­tist seat­ed next to her start­ed gush­ing about the HIV mol­e­cule the big phar­ma had just li­censed from a small Japan­ese com­pa­ny. It was so po­tent in mon­keys, the sci­en­tist said, that they couldn’t fig­ure out what the low­est ef­fec­tive dose was and it stayed in the an­i­mals for an in­cred­i­bly long time, far longer than the ap­proved drugs HIV pa­tients took dai­ly.

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