August 4, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
In light of Bayer AG ’s shift out of the plastics business it is doubling down on cross-species research strategies. This slightly tenuous approach is to examine drug and chemical mechanisms not only in animals as compared to humans, but in plants as well, and try to apply them to human drug development.
Based in Germany, Bayer AG (BAYZF) has three main business divisions, HealthCare, CropScience and MaterialScience. Unloading its MaterialScience division will allow the company to focus on pure life sciences. Although the MaterialScience unit is valued at about $11.7 billion, it is the least profitable of the three units.
Now that they are in the process of having two primary units focused entirely on the life sciences, the company is returning to an idea that has been around for a while, but hasn’t really taken hold in the biopharma industry—that the overlap between plant biology, human and animal biology can be exploited for drug development.
As an example, Bayer discusses small worms, called nematodes, that attack the roots of peanut and cotton plants. The company developed an insecticide that essentially starves the nematodes of oxygen. Drug researchers at Bayer are working to apply the same type of mechanism to oncology drugs, specifically a possible treatment for skin cancer in humans and in heartworm in dogs.
The name of this is The Nimbus Initiative named after one of the Quidditch brooms in the Harry Potter series.
An example of products of this nature is a Bayer crop insecticide, Gaucho. Gaucho’s active ingredient is also used in Bayer’s product Advantage, used to kill fleas in pets. “The new element now is doing this in a much more systematic way with a real data-driven backbone,” said Liam Condom, head of Bayer’s crop unit in an interview with Bloomberg Business. The approach is “to develop products in parallel and not sequentially.”
There is some skepticism. “The synergies between pharma and crop science are minimal, especially in the area of research and development,” said Markus Manns, a fund manager at Union Investment Luxembourg SA, which holds a one percent share of Bayer, in the Bloomberg article. “There are definitely more synergies between animal and human health, but not many.” What Manns does like about the approach, however, isn’t the research overlaps, but that the two units, healthcare and crops science, balance risk and growth and act as a guard against possible takeovers.
In a related story, Environmental Science, a division of Bayer CropScience LP, announced today that Case Medlin and Harry Quicke were joining the Bayer Stewardship Team. Based in Research Triangle Park, N.C., Environmental Science’s Stewardship Team focuses on providing “vegetation management professionals and end-use customers with the technical support they need to be good stewards of the land and to navigate an increasingly complex business and regulatory environment.”
“As we continue to grow our vegetation management portfolio at Bayer and strengthen our commitment to industry-leading stewardship, it is a privilege to have professionals such as Case and Harry join our team,” said Matt Nespeca, head of commercial operations for the Bayer Vegetation Management business, in a statement. “We anticipate they will have immediate impact in partnering with our customers to realize how Bayer products provide best-in-class solutions across the IVM, forestry, and range and pasture markets.”
