MRK vs TCRT

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.

Alaunos Therapeutics Inc.

Alaunos Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage oncology-focused cell therapy company, develops adoptive TCR engineered T-cell therapies. It develops TCR Library, which is in Phase I/II clinical trial for ten TCRs reactive to mutated KRAS, TP53, and EGFR from its TCR library for the treatment of non-small cell lung, colorectal, endometrial, pancreatic, ovarian, and bile duct cancers; hunTR, a human neoantigen T-cell receptor platform; and mbIL-15 to treat solid tumors. Alaunos Therapeutics, Inc. has a license agreement with PGEN Therapeutics, Inc.; research and development agreement with The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center; and a patent license agreement, and research and development agreement with the National Cancer Institute. The company was formerly known as ZIOPHARM Oncology, Inc. and changed its name to Alaunos Therapeutics, Inc. in January 2022. Alaunos Therapeutics, Inc. is headquartered in Houston, Texas.