PhRMA hires ex-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor as its CEO

Former Republican lawmaker Eric Cantor has been named as the new chief executive of US pharma industry group PhRMA and will take up the role on 9th November.

Cantor – who represented Virginia in the US House of Representatives and rose to the position of House Majority Leader from 2011 to 2014 – is taking over from PhRMA's long-serving Steve Ubl, who announced in April that he was stepping down, but would stay on as an advisor until mid-January 2027.

PhRMA said Cantor, who has primarily worked in the investment banking sector since leaving Congress, brings "decades of experience at the intersection of business and public policy to lead the organisation at a pivotal moment for America’s biopharmaceutical industry."

He is retaining a position on the Board of Directors for Moelis & Co, an investment group he led for over a decade, while leading PhRMA.

Ubl's departure from PhRMA came after a sustained period of pressure from successive US administrations on drug pricing, including the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – which introduced Medicare price negotiations – and the Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) policy under Trump.

As Cantor takes over, he will have a gruelling workload navigating the further rollout of Trump's MFN framework and the launch of the GENEROUS framework, which ties state Medicaid drug prices to those charged in comparable developed nations, and the year-by-year scale-up of IRA price negotiations.

His track record in the health arena includes leading the passage of the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act, which laid out a framework for increased federal support of paediatric disease research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

He also supported the enactment of laws that established Medicare Part D – the federal programme that helps patients pay for outpatient prescription drugs – and the 21st Century Cures Act, designed to accelerate the development of new medical products and get them to patients more quickly.

"Eric is well respected among policy leaders in Washington and around the world, with a long track record of working effectively across the political spectrum to achieve important outcomes that have a lasting impact,” said Rob Davis, chairman and CEO of Merck & Co – known as MSD outside the US and Canada – and chair of the PhRMA board of directors.

"Eric’s unique combination of global business acumen coupled with policy and political experience at the highest levels of government make him an ideal person to lead PhRMA during this critical next chapter," he added.