Boston, Dusseldorf The view is top notch. From Bayer’s new US research center in Boston, the scientists have a fantastic view across the Charles River of the city, its brick houses, skyscrapers and gilded domes. The elite universities MIT and Harvard are in the immediate vicinity. 100 Bayer researchers are working here on the future of medicine.
The pharmaceutical company from Leverkusen has named its center BRIC, “Bayer Science and Innovation Hub”. Bayer has invested around 100 million dollars. It is intended to advance the pharmaceuticals division, the most important division next to agrochemicals with a turnover of 19 billion euros.
The goals of the Leverkusen-based company are big: in 2030, Bayer’s pharmaceuticals division should contribute $30 billion to sales, says Christine Roth, who has headed Bayer’s oncology business unit and thus the cancer medicine division since 2022.
At today’s exchange rates, that would be an increase of at least 50 percent. Successes in oncology should make a decisive contribution to this. “We’ve seen a 25 percent increase in cancer cases over the past twenty years,” says Roth. Young people also get cancer more often without being able to explain it medically. The new Bayer manager wants to make the company one of the top ten players in oncology.
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Central to this is Bayer’s commitment in Boston. The city on the east coast and the surrounding regions are considered the heart of the American biotech industry and medical research. Hundreds of start-ups, research institutes and established pharmaceutical companies are looking for groundbreaking new therapies here.
Bayer wants to benefit from a US government cancer offensive
Only on Monday of this week did US President Joe Biden visit the capital of Massachusetts and give a speech on his “Moonshot Initiative”. He has dedicated himself to the fight against cancer: within 25 years, cancer rates should be reduced by at least 50 percent. Biden knows how important the know-how from Boston is for this.
The city is considered the center of the American biotech scene.
(Photo: imago images/Cavan Images)
Bayer also wants to use this ecosystem with its unique mix of talents. The group is fully committed to the so-called biorevolution: the combination of artificial intelligence and data analysis with innovative medical approaches such as cell and gene therapy.
These are two young fields of research that promise great advances for medicine, for example in the fight against muscle weakness, cancer and other diseases. The idea: body cells are converted back into stem cells and then grow into heart muscle cells, for example. New drugs can be tested on these. The vision is to implant such cells in patients and thus replace damaged cells in the body.
Gene therapy, on the other hand, aims to combat genetic diseases, for example, by correcting faulty genes. Many of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world are working on such therapies. The same applies to all of them: the new approaches are promising, but the research is highly risky.
Start-up Bluerock plays an important role in Bayer’s plans
The focus for Bayer is the biotech start-up Bluerock, which the group acquired in 2019 for around $600 million. It is considered a prime example of the company’s own strategy of managing acquired start-ups “at arm’s length”: Bayer invested in Bluerock back in 2016. When his research turned out to be promising, the group took over the company entirely, but did not integrate the start-up into its own organization, but managed it as an independent subsidiary.
“In gene and cell therapy, we are building a whole platform of companies.” Bayer manager Patrick Bussfeld
Bluerock is researching new cell therapy approaches to treat cancer and Parkinson’s, among other things. “Medicine is changing dramatically,” says Bluerock CEO Seth Effenberg. “And working with Bayer makes a lot of things easier.” The group offers access to a global network of researchers, but also to know-how in cooperation with supervisory authorities and health systems.
Bluerock’s projects are still in a very early stage of development. But Bayer wants to show staying power here. “In gene and cell therapy, we are building up an entire platform of companies,” says Patrick Bussfeld, who is responsible for Bluerock research at the Leverkusen team.
Berlin, one of the central German locations of Bayer’s pharmaceutical division, should also benefit from this. Bayer wants to expand research in the Wedding district and turn it into a “second Boston”. Bluerock has already opened an office in Berlin.
“Germany lacks the ecosystem that we find in the US”
That’s an ambitious goal, as Bayer CEO Werner Baumann knows. “Germany lacks the ecosystem that we find in the US,” he explains. There are also brilliant scientists in the Federal Republic – but the necessary environment with venture capital investors and competing start-ups is missing. In addition, regulation is much less innovation-friendly, says Baumann.
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In the short term, however, the visions from Boston and Berlin do not help. The pharmaceutical division is under time pressure. It has to cushion the expiry of patents for important drugs, above all for the current bestsellers, the anticoagulant Xarelto and the eye medicine Eylea.
Bayer relies on an extension of the patents, for example through new dosages. In addition, the group has currently brought several promising products to market that could mitigate and slow down the decline in sales from 2024 onwards. In order to increase pharmaceutical sales by 50 percent by the end of the decade, however, promising young projects must now be developed.
Even CEO Baumann sees the fact that Bayer has some catching up to do in the early and middle development phase. Investments in promising start-ups should help. Targets identified Bayer’s investment unit Leaps, a captive venture capitalist that has invested more than $1.5 billion in over 50 start-ups since 2015. “Our time horizon does not end after ten years,” explains boss Jürgen Eckhardt. “Leaps brings companies and talent together.”
Cancer cases have increased by a quarter.
(Photo: dpa)
One of the talents is Nabiha Saklayen, born in Saudi Arabia and daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants. According to the US magazine Forbes, the doctor of physics is one of the “30 under 30” talents in healthcare. Saklayen is researching the processing of cells using lasers and has applied for a patent for a new process. Leaps has also invested in their company Cellino.
Cellino uses machine learning approaches, often referred to as artificial intelligence. “We train algorithms to identify suitable stem cells,” explains the start-up boss, for example those that are not abnormally modified and potentially carcinogenic.
So far, this has been a manual process in which highly paid scientists have had to observe the cells under a microscope for days. Now image recognition processes could take over, such as those used in autonomous mobility.
AI is not a panacea in pharmaceutical research
Alex Burgin, Director at the Broad Institute, a research institute of the Universities of MIT and Harvard, which cooperates with numerous pharmaceutical companies, also has hopes in such new processes. Six Bayer researchers are currently working in the laboratory. The non-profit institute is located very close to the Bayer Center in the Cambridge district of Boston. Among other things, heart diseases are being researched.
“The computer will not develop medicines. You need people for that. And time.” Alex Burgin, director at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Universities
“AI can help with image recognition and thereby significantly speed up research,” says Burgin. However, the technology is not a panacea. “The computer will not develop medicines. You need people for that. And time.”
The Broad Institute also shows that Bayer is under pressure to produce results. “Sometimes there are conflicts,” says Principal Burgin. “When our joint research teams have new findings, we want to publish them as quickly as possible in a specialist journal.” Bayer wants something else: to protect its own intellectual property in order to bring patented drugs onto the market. “Here we rub against each other. Then the lawyers have to take care of it.”
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