Bayer looks to build on innovation

Bayer is banking on new technologies such as pharming. of APIs, nanotechnology and computer simulation, to secure its global success, particularly among the top pharmaceutical companies of the future. The recent acquisition of Schering puts the company into the world's top ten suppliers of specialty pharmaceuticals.

The company said its group-wide innovation project initiated in April this year has so far produced more that 1,600 ideas from its more than 100,000 employees. These ideas will be evaluated by experts for potential new products.

No slouch when it comes to innovation, the company claims to achieve on average, three new patent applications every working day and will have invested nearly Euro 1.9bn in r&d this year.

While the company plans to focus on the fast-growing areas of healthcare, crop protection and high-tech materials, the majority of its sales will come from the healthcare division.

Bayer claims to have a healthy drug pipeline and has achieved some of the shortest development times for new products. Nexavar, its recently approved kidney cancer drug, for example, was developed and brought to market in under seven years. It is now at an advanced stage of clinical testing for the treatment of liver, skin and lung cancer.

The company's potential blockbuster oral antithrombosis drug rivaroxaban, a Factor Xa inhibitor, is currently in Phase III clinical testing and it expects to receive marketing authorisation for this drug in the prevention of venous thromboembolism in 2008.

It has also strengthened its portfolio of hormonal contraceptives with the Yasmin product family and saw the registration of YAZ as a contraceptive in the US. Most recently it has received US marketing authorisation for Betaferon - the only frequently applied high-dose beta-interferon registered for the treatment of early-stage multiple sclerosis patients.

At the company's innovations conference, Bayer chairman Werner Wenning voiced concerns about proposals to restrict drug pricing, saying the German government's proposed legislation was 'the wrong way to go'.

The plans call for health insurers to be allowed to set the level of reimbursements for innovative drug products. This would effectively put an end to market pricing for drugs,. said Wenning.

Cost-benefit evaluation of drug products would also be a major obstacle, if it doesn't take place according to internationally accepted rules, he said.

One of the technologies that Bayer believes could lead to cheaper drugs is plant biotechnology. Customised plants could be used as 'bioreactors' to manufacture pharmaceutical active ingredients such as antibodies or vaccines more quickly, more efficiently and more cost-effectively.

Icon Genetics, a subsidiary of Bayer Innovation GmbH, already uses tobacco plants to produce pharmaceuticals, and substantial market opportunities are foreseen in this area.

'This creates a basis for producing medicines to treat diseases occurring in only small groups of patients - diseases for which research was prohibitively expensive until now,' said Wenning.

For the near future, however, the new pharmaceuticals division - Bayer Schering Pharma - will focus on three major projects: the Schering-developed contrast agent Vasovist for high-resolution vascular imaging; rivaroxaban, an anticoagulant drug at an advanced stage of clinical development, in the prevention and therapy of thromboembolic disease; and alfimeprase, an agent capable of dissolving blood clots.