Interview by Robin Marshall – published in the Pharma Industry Review, March 2025
“MSD focuses on developing original, innovative treatments, looking at fields where there is no treatment yet. We would like to help where the need is largest.”
In an exclusive interview with the Budapest Business Journal, Konrád Keresztes, associate director of health policy and communications at MSD Hungary, discusses healthcare investments, the importance of diversity in clinical trials, and the pharma firm’s strategic partnerships with universities and government bodies.
“Hungary is a key country for MSD in the region and globally. We have 200 people working in Hungary, with approximately 100 people only on research and development,” Keresztes says. He notes that pharma companies are, by their nature, R&D-heavy organizations but argues that, even so, MSD is outstanding in this regard.
“Another key number to consider is that globally we spent 50% of our sales revenue in 2023 on research and development, which was USD 30 billion.”
Oncology is the largest therapeutic area, but there is also a diverse vaccine portfolio for children and adults. Cardiometabolic, infectious diseases and immunology are also in focus. Keresztes says the range of innovative medicines is likely to grow.
“Twenty-five-plus new treatments are in the pipeline to happen in the next five years.. There are ongoing trials in many other fields showing how dedicated we are to the overall health of the world’s population.”
“MSD focuses on developing original, innovative treatments, looking at fields where there is no treatment yet. We would like to help where the need is largest.” – says Keresztes.
“Genetic profiling, bioinformatics and modern therapy manufacturing arrived at a fascinating point by now. Everyone is unique to their genetic dataset and most medicine don’t take this difference into account (however, still efficient). Can you imagine a world, where you get a treatment that is 100% tailored to your genetic information and could be only used by you? Would you be surprised if I told you that this medicine is currently developed by MSD and the release to the market is only a couple of years away from now? We are developing this neoantigen-based medicine in collaboration with Moderna, a global vaccine manufacturer, and the idea behind is to treat different cancer types in a completely personalized manner. To give you perspective, this individualized neoantigen therapy was first tested in 2018, now almost 8 years ago. Testing of this groundbreaking science is currently at Phase 3 stage in application for lung cancer.” – shared the associate director.
That the pharma firm would put time and effort into developing new drug therapies makes sense, but that isn’t the only place where it invests its money. Indeed, it has set up an arm to do just that.
“The MSD Global Health Innovation Fund, based in the U.S. and founded in 2010 with USD 600 million, already has 70 plus investments in digital health companies, data research companies, some dealing with clinical research,” he explains.
“The aim is to accelerate these companies into [market] ready solutions, not just prototypes. One example is Hungary’s Turbine AI, into which the MSD Global Health Innovation Fund has invested USD 25 mln-plus.”
Budapest-based Turbine AI is harnessing artificial intelligence to build Simulated Cell, a platform to interpret human biology via computer modeling using machine learning and molecular biology. It covers everything from helping spot targets for new therapies to finding the best patient matches on which to test them.
MSD Hungary has also been investing in the country, not least in its regional distribution center. Established in 2014, the base employs state-of-the-art storage and logistics technology for medicines serving 14 European countries. And then, of course, there are the clinical trials.
“Between 2010 and 2024, the cumulative investment was around HUF 45 bln. The annual research investment that we spend on trials has been increasing. From 2020, we spent around HUF 3 bln a year on clinical trials. One-third of this is provided in the form of medicine, thus relieving the National Health Insurance Fund of spending nearly HUF one billion.
A side note to this story is that MSD, one of the most important players in clinical research is keen on trials being diverse and is trying to encourage more people to sign up for them in general, particularly more women. Interestingly, significantly fewer women participate in clinical trials than men: for a drug to be effective and safe for the entire society, diversity of volunteers is important – since the female body differs from the male in many respects.
“It is important to recruit enough patients in a given condition with the right parameters for a clinical trial,” notes Keresztes. “We also help the doctors and patients with digitized solutions to accelerate the entire clinical trial process in a more streamlined and comfortable way.”
Keresztes argues that Turbine AI is just one example of a growing startup ecosystem in Hungary. MSD has developing relationships with Hungary’s four medical universities and others involved in accessing, mining and using data.
“One way that we create value, not just for universities, but for the population in Hungary, is the data that we generate and analyze in partnership with university professors,” he says.
MSD also has a local data generation team, which takes information from clinical settings that can later be analyzed “to make significant papers that can also drive policy-making and government decision-making.” It is already proving fruitful.
“A recent OECD-European Commission country cancer profile cited a key finding from the Hungarian Undiagnosed Lung Cancer (HULC) study[1] that our data team facilitated. In this we demonstrated that that the perception that cancer mortality and incidence rates in Hungary seem exceptionally high compared to other European countries is largely due to methodological biases rather than actual epidemiological extremes. This shows how our real-world evidence research is shaping oncology policy discussions even at the EU level. We are very proud of that.”
The BBJ has often covered how Hungary’s unusually centralized healthcare system generates vast amounts of data, much of it digitized in the National eHealth Infrastructure (EESZT) in a way most European nations could only dream of. But like any resource, the data is only truly useful if you can extract it from the mine. We are on the verge of that happening, Keresztes says.
“There’s a real drive to open up the state’s national health data pool for research and development from 2026, and we are already in active discussions on how we could be among the first to be a part of that and how we could develop AI algorithms that could help the whole ecosystem,” he explains.
“In general, because there’s a better data pool in Hungary, we think there are better opportunities here. There’s the data we publish, the EESzT database, and the university databases that we would also like to use for the same purpose,” the health policy and communications expert says.
“There’s an increasing amount of data that we have access to today or hope to have access to soon, and there’s an increasing amount of papers and findings that we can make based on this data.
“Overall, I would say that the way we look at AI and data makes us cooperative innovators. That’s who we are and what we want to be: a trusted partner who drives innovation in healthcare.”
This article was made possible by MSD Pharma Hungary Kft. 1095 Budapest, Lechner Ödön fasor 10/B, +36-1-888-5300, hungary_msd@merck.com, date of closing: 03/04/2025. HU-NON-01499
[1] Kiss Z et al. Front Oncol. 2022 Nov 25;12:1032366. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2022.1032366. eCollection 2022
