CEO Bill Anderson said despite prior cost-cutting measures, Bayer still has too many layers of management and bureaucracy. A new restructuring will come with layoffs but the corporate shakeup plan does not yet include a separation of Bayer’s business units.
An independent data monitoring committee concluded Bayer’s experimental drug for atrial fibrillation would not be more effective than Eliquis, a blockbuster product currently used for the indication. Consequently, Bayer decided to stop that Phase 3 test for the once-daily oral small molecule.
Bayer opens its new cell therapy manufacturing facility as it prepares a Parkinson’s disease cell therapy for Phase 2 testing. The new 100,000 square foot facility also has space for manufacturing other cell therapies in the pharma giant’s pipeline.
A Bayer cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease has met primary and secondary goals of its first test in humans, and the pharmaceutical giant is now planning for a larger Phase 2 clinical trial expected to begin enrollment in the first half of next year.
Aspen Neurosciences is developing a cell therapy that uses a patient’s own stem cells to develop a personalized treatment for Parkinson’s disease. The approach is slightly different than that of Bayer, whose experimental Parkinson’s cell therapy is made from stem cells sourced from healthy donors.
Bayer is committing another €1.3 billion to Leaps by Bayer, the company’s investment arm, to support additional investments in companies developing innovative technologies in healthcare and agriculture. In addition to backing companies developing cell and gene therapies, Leaps has also deployed its cash to startups developing artificial intelligence technologies for a range of applications.
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
As the annual J.P. Morgan HealthCare Conference kicked off Monday, two pharma giants unveiled deals that give them access to in-vivo gene editing technologies. Pfizer is teaming up with Beam Therapeutics to develop new base-editing therapies while Bayer hopes to develop new medicines with the in-vivo CRISPR editing tools of Mammoth Biosciences.
The app lets people track their metrics through connected devices, and access health coaching and educational materials. It’s one of multiple that Bayer and One Drop plan to develop together in the future.
The FDA has approved Bayer’s Kerendia to treat chronic kidney disease in patients with type 2 diabetes. The drug is the first in its class, giving the pharma giant an alternative way to compete against medicines already marketed by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
Leaps by Bayer led a $90 million investment round into Ada, a German digital health startup with an AI-based symptom checker. As part of the deal, the two companies are also striking a broader strategic partnership.
Munck Wilson Mandala Partner Greg Howison shared his perspective on some of the legal ramifications around AI, IP, connected devices and the data they generate, in response to emailed questions.
BlueRock Therapeutics, a Bayer subsidiary, is teaming up with Opsis Therapeutics and Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics in an R&D pact focused on developing stem cell therapies for eye diseases. BlueRock is paying its new partners $30 million up front to kick off the alliance.
The deal, offering $2 billion up front and $2 billion in future milestone payments, includes a gene therapy manufacturing facility and a pipeline that includes treatments for Parkinson's and congestive heart failure.
The partnership includes a $30 million upfront payment from Bayer and potentially more than $100 million in milestones per program generated through the partnering of the German drugmaker's molecule library and Recursion's artificial intelligence-based drug discovery platform.
The company hopes to use the money to bring its T-cell antigen coupler cell therapy technology - currently in preclinical development - into human clinical trials. German drugmaker Bayer's venture capital arm led the round.
KaNDy's lead product candidate, NT-814, is a non-hormonal treatment for symptoms of menopause. The drug completed Phase IIb testing and is slated to start Phase III testing next year.
