Head of Global Policy, Mylan
By Kristen Uppercue
A few months after being hired by Mylan, Marcie McClintic Coates was visiting with her husband’s grandmother when she proudly showed McClintic Coates that the cost of her blood pressure medication had just been cut by almost $75, thanks to a new generic version available on the market. As it turned out, she was boasting about a Mylan medication that McClintic Coates had provided legal work on in order to help seniors gain earlier access to more affordable prescriptions.
With that experience, McClintic Coates, a White Sulphur Springs, WV, native, was able to quickly see the kind of positive impact from her hard work that she had witnessed her parents have in their community while she was growing up. Her mother had worked at the front desk of the Greenbrier Clinic and delivered homemade meals to widows and those with relatives in the hospital nearly every week. Her father was a local principal, coached many sports teams and served as the associate pastor of their church.
“My mom taught me the importance of common sense and kindness, and my dad taught me the importance of education,” she says. “They worked hard for me and my siblings to have every opportunity to succeed.”
From a young age, McClintic Coates knew she wanted to study law. She served as the president of her student body in junior high and high school, where she was passionate about fairness and equality as it pertained to school policies.
“Even though I didn’t know any lawyers, I understood that being an attorney meant you could help change things that weren’t fair or right, and this excited me,” she says. “A law degree seemed to be a good starting point to build a career I could feel passionate about.”
She attended Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where she majored in business management. During her undergraduate years, McClintic Coates spent a semester studying in Washington, D.C., and was selected as the Oval Office intern during President Bill Clinton’s last six months in office. She credits this experience as the one that solidified her desire to study law because during that internship she was surrounded by professionals with law degrees.
After completing her undergraduate degree in 2002, she enrolled at West Virginia University (WVU), where she worked toward a law degree and MBA simultaneously.
“I loved working on my MBA in parallel with my law degree,” she says. “Unlike law school, which was based on individual learning, the MBA program was very team focused. I brought the team-based approach from the MBA program to the West Virginia Law Review, where I was editor in chief, and this allowed us to divide up our workload and use the remaining time to plan the largest symposium WVU Law had ever held.”
Like many of her peers, McClintic Coates was inspired by her property law professor, Joyce McConnell, because she made sure her students understood the unintended impacts law can sometimes have on people and their communities. McConnell also encouraged her to get involved with the law review because of the boost it would give her résumé after graduation.
“I didn’t even know what the law review was, but Joyce insisted I do it, so I did,” she remembers. “She was totally right. My time as editor in chief helped distinguish my résumé in the highly competitive D.C. market after law school.”
There were many steps along McClintic Coates’ path to Mylan that helped prepare her for her current role as head of global policy. One of particular importance was a class she took in law school.
“I took a seminar class that gave me the flexibility to study a health care law topic of my choice for the semester,” she says. “A couple of people on my MBA team were employees at Mylan, and I was intrigued with how generic drugs could legally come to market. Little did I know that I would end up writing a seminar paper outlining my future job as a regulatory attorney for Mylan.”
After completing her law degree and MBA, McClintic Coates began practicing law with Faegre Baker Daniels in Washington, D.C. Not long into that position, she attended a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to discuss barriers that stifle patient access to more affordable medicine where Mylan’s now-CEO Heather Bresch was testifying. McClintic Coates was so impressed by the West Virginia-founded company that she reached out to their leadership to see if she could do some work for them in D.C. They instead offered her a job in the legal department as a regulatory attorney. A few attorneys she had met in Washington, D.C., cautioned her about taking the job in West Virginia so early in her career, but McClintic Coates believed in the company and its ability to grow globally. Three months after she accepted the position and moved to Morgantown, Mylan announced the acquisition of Merck KGaA. Almost overnight, the West Virginia company went from serving one country to nearly 165.
McClintic Coates continued to move up the ranks at Mylan from associate regulatory counsel to global regulatory counsel in the legal department to vice president and chief of staff to the CEO. She then worked as the head of global regulatory affairs before taking on her current role as the head of global policy. In this position, she oversees Mylan’s health and public policy efforts in the various markets the company serves around the world.
Working for a pharmaceutical company, one of the biggest challenges she faces is being in a heavily science-based environment without a formal science background.
“I quickly learned that in order to help my clients, I need to be humble enough to speak up when I don’t understand something,” she says. “However, sometimes the simplicity of my questions illuminates a different way for the experts to see a path we may have overlooked. This is one of my favorite things about Mylan—my colleagues are willing to share what they know, and each area of expertise really brings added value.”
Over the last decade, working with what she considers the best colleagues in the industry has enabled her to help reverse a number of unnecessary barriers that have either delayed or denied patient access to more affordable medicines both within and outside the U.S. One project she is especially proud of is her role in the negotiation and drafting of the FDA Amendments Act of 2012, which updated an outdated law from 1938 that effectively held prescription drugs manufactured outside the U.S. to a different standard than drugs manufactured here.
While McClintic Coates’ work has been widely recognized in her industry, she says her greatest accolade came recently at bedtime during story time with her 3-year-old daughter.
“She told me when she grows up, she wants to help people because that’s what her mommy does,” says McClintic Coates. “And she made it clear she will wear high heels too.”
McClintic Coates is extremely proud of her roots in White Sulphur Springs, so when the area was affected by devastating flooding in 2016, she was driven to do her part to help. She worked with community members, volunteers and organizations like the disaster recovery nonprofits Homes for West Virginia and SBP to help those who had lost everything. A $1 million donation from Mylan and a gift from White Sulphur Springs native and MedExpress founder Dr. Frank Alderman enabled them to build a new housing community with more than 40 new homes.
“Not only did this effort help families get back home, but the generous gift from Mylan made me so proud to work at a place that truly cares about the community,” she says. “I was so humbled by the gift, I wanted to help make sure the money was put to direct use for good.”
McClintic Coates’ community service didn’t end with flood recovery. Today, she serves on the Association for Accessible Medicine board of directors, the trade association for the generic drug industry in Washington, D.C., and she devotes time to the Dispensary of Hope, a nonprofit that provides free medication to people throughout the country. She also serves on the board of the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership organization, where she was recently elected vice chair. She also enjoys mentoring high school and college-aged women on how to find their path in life.
“So many young people and professionals agonize over the ongoing search of figuring out exactly what they want to be,” she says. “My advice is to change your mindset and stop obsessing over what you want to be and instead focus on how you want to be.”
While McClintic Coates gets to travel around with the world with Mylan, she never forgets where she came from or the hardworking West Virginians like her parents who helped instill in her the strong values that have lended to her success.
“West Virginia is such a special place to me,” she says. “From singing ‘Country Roads’ at Mountaineer Field to witnessing the outpouring of love as neighbors gave more than they had to give following the 2016 floods, there is something enduring about this place that never leaves me no matter where I go.”
