Bayer CEO Werner Baumann will face a fresh leadership challenge at the company’s annual general meeting scheduled for Apr. 29. Singapore-based Temasek Holdings, which is said to have helped the German group stem its $63 billion purchase of Monsanto in 2018, has soured on the costly and still controversial acquisition and sees Baumann as having bungled it.
Private equity investor Cinven is poised to acquire Bayer’s Environmental Science Professional (ESP) unit, Bloomberg has reported. The news agency’s sources said the buyer of the business put up for sale a year ago was expected to be announced in the early part of March this year.
The agrochemicals market has seen intermittent supply shortages for key herbicide ingredients for several months, and a herbicide shortfall had been predicted for the current crop growing season. With glitches following glitches, reports of a worsening market accelerated at the end of last week, when Bayer CropScience declared force majeure for glyphosate and glyphosate-based products.
The pharma industry’s poaching season is on, though some say it’s never off, just taking a break. In the latest drugmaker-to-drugmaker side-swap, among the top news this week was that Bayer has hired away GlaxoSmithKline’s head of oncology therapy, Christine Roth, just as the UK pharma was seen to be reestablishing its position in cancer therapeutics.
Bayer will potentially pump well over $1 billion into another major gene therapy collaboration, this time with Brisbane, California-based Mammoth BioSciences. In the pact announced during the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, held virtually for the second consecutive year, the German pharma and agriculture group said it aims to tap the US company’s knowhow in CRISPR systems to develop in vivo gene-editing therapies.
In a departure from the accustomed geographical pattern of litigation against Bayer, investors based in Germany are suing the company for €2.2 billion ($2.5 billion). The shareholders are unhappy about the decline in the company’s share price on the back of hefty damage awards to US plaintiffs claiming that Monsanto’s non-selective herbicide Roundup caused their non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Infrastructure company Currenta, which operates chemical parks formerly belonging to the Bayer group in Leverkusen, Dormagen and Uerdingen, Germany, has come under increasing pressure as industry-critical groups accuse it of not paying enough attention to safety and not being straightforward enough about a discharge of chemicals-laced firefighting water into the Rhine River.
Bayer has now won two of five cases in which US plaintiffs have charged that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup caused their cancer. All the cases have been heard in the state of California. In the second consecutive victory for the German group, a jury in San Bernardino County found that Roundup was not the cause of a woman's non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).
During its Dec. 10, session, the US Supreme Court has said it will review Bayer’s petition to have the country’s highest court decide whether a federal district court’s judgment in favor of Edwin Hardeman should be allowed to stand.
Bayer has lost another appeal of one of its three lost Roundup cases. The Supreme Court of the US state of California late last week declined to review the verdict in the trial Pilliod v. Monsanto. The German group, which bought Monsanto in 2018 as the first round of litigation was getting started, petitioned for a review this past September.
Liam Condon, head of Bayer CropScience, will resign his position at the end of 2021 and will be succeeded on Jan.1, 2022 by Rodrigo Santos, chief operating officer of the Bayer agrochemicals business. Three months later, Condon will move to London-headquartered chemical company Johnson Matthey as its new CEO.
German specialty chemicals producer Lanxess has joined the growing list of European and US companies seeking to unload their engineering plastics activities – in one way or another. In a Nov. 11 statement, the Cologne-based player announced plans to spin off its High Performance Materials business into an independent legal entity from January 2022.
Bayer’s pharmaceuticals division is spending more than €400 million to expand its production facilities for contraceptives in low and middle-income countries, in partnership with international organizations such as the United Nations Population Fund and the United States Agency for International Development.
Bayer has won its first case in four US lawsuits charging that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide caused a person’s cancer. A jury in Los Angeles, California, on Oct. 5 rejected a mother’s charge that her spraying Roundup on the family’s property exposed her son to the pesticide and caused him to develop Burkitt’s lymphoma – a form of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).
On behalf of Monsanto, which it carries as a US subsidiary, Bayer is pressing ahead with plans floated earlier to ask the US Supreme Court to review one of the three US court cases it has lost to plaintiffs charging that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide caused their cancer.
In a deal potentially worth $2 billion, German drugs and agriculture company Bayer is acquiring Vividion Therapeutics, a San Diego-based US biotech. The California company focuses on using protein surface screening to unlock high value, traditionally undruggable, targets.
New wide-sweeping restrictions on the use of glyphosate, active ingredient in herbicides such as the Monsanto-developed Roundup and the subject of thousands of lawsuits still dogging Bayer, will take hold in Germany at the end of July or beginning of August, the agriculture ministry said.
Two EU authorities, the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), are poised to begin reviewing a draft assessment of the safety of glyphosate. The license for the active ingredient in the Monsanto-developed Roundup herbicide comes up for renewal at the end of 2022, and the opinions will form the basis for a decision by the European Commission.
Bayer has announced plans to acquire Noria Therapeutics and PSMA Therapeutics, thereby obtaining exclusive rights to a differentiated alpha radionuclide investigational compound based on actinium-225 and a small molecule directed towards prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA).
Disappointed by San Francisco district judge Vince Chhabria’s decision to dismiss its proposed $2 billion plan to settle future claims that Monsanto’s flagship herbicide Roundup causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Bayer has said it may stop selling the glyphosate-based version on the US retail market.
A US federal appeals court has upheld a $25 million jury award for the plaintiff in one of three major court battles Bayer has fought and lost over claims linking Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide to non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
A Mexican court has reversed a ruling that favored Bayer in a legal challenge brought by the German pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals group against Mexico’s plan to ban glyphosate. In a statement, the country’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources said the Collegiate Court had revoked the provisional suspension of plans to prohibit use of the chemical, of which Bayer is a leading producer.
The European Chemical Industry has set out on an ambitious path to become carbon neutral. Germany, as one of the major chemical manufacturing nations, has committed to achieve this goal by 2050.
As one glitch after another at Covid vaccine suppliers upends deliveries, the German federal government is drawing up plans to build up production within its borders, federal health minister Jens Spahn said at a weekly news conference, thereby confirming remarks made by future vaccine commissioner Christoph Krupp in a pre-published newspaper interview.
The European Chemical Industry has set out on an ambitious path to become carbon neutral.
Bayer has announced its intention to offload the Environmental Science Professional business as part of plans to accelerate the strategy implementation of its Crop Science division.
Vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 continue to dominate global pharma market headlines. As the pandemic drags on, new issues continuously arise, some of them discouraging, such as the emergence of more and more virus mutants or production glitches that threaten to curb supply.
CureVac has agreed a collaboration with Bayer to speed up production and distribution of its Covid-19 vaccine candidate CVnCOV, which began clinical trials in December with a goal of 36,500 participants in Europe and Asia.
Through a subsidiary, Shanghai, China-based WuXi Biologics (WuXi Bio) is acquiring Bayer’s biologics substance plant at Wuppertal, Germany, for €150 million ($183.3 million).The transaction, expected to close in the first half of 2021, follows earlier Wuxi Bio purchases of plants the pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals group is shedding in Germany and the US.
Bayer has taken another a step toward embracing cell therapy, this week signing a worldwide license agreement with Atara Biotherapeutics for next-generation, mesothelin-directed CAR-T cell therapies for treatment of solid tumors.
In yet another legal repercussion of Bayer’s 2018 acquisition of Monsanto, a US federal judge has rejected the German group’s proposed $648 million settlement of class-action litigation over historic contamination from polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
In its biggest pharma acquisition since the 2006 takeover of Berlin-based women’s specialist Schering, Bayer plans to plunk down up to $4 billion for US biotech firm Asklepios BioPharmaceutical (AskBio). Under the agreed terms, Bayer will pay $2 billion upfront and up to $2 billion more, contingent on certain success milestones.
The California Supreme Court has declined to hear Bayer’s appeal of the first jury verdict against it in a series of cases brought by US plaintiffs charging that Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide causes cancer.
In January, Schrödinger, a provider of integrated software solutions, and the life sciences company Bayer announced a 5-year technology alliance to develop a comprehensive de novo design solution to accelerate the discovery of innovative, high-quality drugs.
Bayer’s life science investment arm Leaps by Bayer and Singapore investor group Temasek have formed a new joint vertical farming company called Unfold. The companies did not disclose their respective shares in the venture, which will use seed genetics – or germplasm – from vegetable crops to develop new seed varieties tailored for vertical farms.
