January 7, 2014

Bayer aims to accelerate result of project in discovering new ingredients

In an aim to yield results as early as 2016, Germany's Bayer expects a campaign to accelerate the pace of new discoveries of ingredients for pharmaceuticals and pesticides.

"We expect it to be reflected in our pipeline in the next two, three, four, five years," Wolfgang Plischke, Bayer's outgoing innovation chief, said in an interview.

Under the project named Nimbus, announced in 2012, Bayer's human and animal health businesses as well as its CropScience division are being tied together more closely and hundreds of Bayer researchers are encouraged to exchange information that could help in the discovery of new ingredients.

The company hopes the project will give it an edge over rivals such as Sanofi, Pfizer or Syngenta, which do not have all three business areas under one roof.

Bayer has plans to provide up to €30 million (US$41.3 million) per year to finance the Nimbus project. It spent an overall €3.01 billion (US$4.1 billion) on research in 2012, up from €2.9 billion (US$3.95 billion) in 2011.