Bayer Funds New Joint Research Lab with $30 Million Over 5 Years

Bayer, Brigham and Women's Hospital (BMH) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have launched a joint laboratory to research new drugs to treat chronic lung diseases. Scientists from all three institutions will participating. Bayer is investing more than $30 million to fund the projects over the next five years.

Four researchers have been named to the project: Edwin Silverman, Chief of the Channing Division of Network Medicine at BWH; Bruce Levy, Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care at BMH; Benjamin Medoff, Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care at MGH; and Markus Koch, Head of Preclinical Research, Lung Diseases at Bayer.

“This strategic collaboration complements our in-house research and will bring us closer to providing life-changing treatment options for patients living with chronic lung diseases,” said Joerg Moeller, member of the Executive Committee of Bayer’s Pharmaceutical Division and Head of Research and Development. “The joint lab concept continues to be an innovative model for collaboration between academia and industry, enabling novel approaches to drug discovery.”

The laboratory will be located BWH in Boston, in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area. Bayer also has a presence in Boston, as, of course, does MGH. Bayer committed earlier this year to opening laboratory and office space in Kendall Square, and last year established a joint lab in Boston with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to focus on cardiovascular diseases.

It is expected to host more than 20 people from all three organizations. Any commercially viable findings will be shared equally between Bayer, BMH and MGH.

Chronic lung diseases cover a lot of ground, but it also includes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which affects about 65 million people worldwide, killing about 3 million annually.

“We strongly believe that this model will significantly accelerate the pace of discovery toward the goal of getting new therapies from the lab to patients safety and efficiently,” said Paul Anderson, chief academic officer for BMH. “This collaboration provides the opportunity to integrate novel findings directly into the drug development pipeline, thus speeding up the time to move a new treatment into the clinic.”

Bayer’s contribution, besides financial, is on drug discovery and development expertise. BMH and MGH has significant clinical development expertise as well as knowledge of disease mechanisms.

In a Q&A on the Bayer website, Moeller noted, “This is a therapeutic area where patients have limited satisfactory treatment options and are in desperate need of new options. At Bayer we already conduct research across a range of lung diseases, and we were looking for a strong partner to complement our own expertise.”

In particular, Bayer is looking at COPD and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF).

BMH’s Levy said that the institution had “led studies identifying more than 80 regions of the genome that are associated with COPD. We conducted cellular and animal model studies of some of these genes which have confirmed their role in COPD susceptibility. MGH investigators also have extensive experience in interstitial lung disease research, complementing the work carried out at BWH.”

MGH, according to Medoff, has a “long-standing research program in the basic mechanisms of lung fibrosis and a growing program in imaging, pathology, and clinical trials in interstitial lung disease. When we met with Bayer it was clear they shared the same passion for investigation and development of novel therapeutics for these devastating diseases.”

Silverman added, “Partners HealthCare and Bayer investigators have complementary strengths that will be leveraged in this joint lab. Our investigators have unique expertise in cell and molecular biology of lung disease, genetics, imaging, and bioinformatics, which complement the expertise Bayer investigators additionally have in drug development, pharmacology, and medicinal chemistry. We anticipate that we will learn a great deal from each other during this collaboration, and that those complementary strengths will lead to greater progress than either group could make by themselves.”