Stefan Oelrich, president of Bayer Pharmaceuticals, the medicines division of the German group, gave the keynote speech at Pharma 2024, the congress that brought together the biotechnology industry in Barcelona. With magnificent Spanish (“I started working in the industry in Argentina, as an intern, in the sales network. In Buenos Aires they called me the little German”), he explains the transformation of Bayer and the challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry in Europe .
Bayer has lost the patent on two of its star drugs, Xarelto (oral anticoagulant) and Eylea (ophthalmological). What are you doing to deal with that impact?
I took over the management of Bayer’s pharmaceutical division five and a half years ago and I was very clear that my first objective had to be to replace the sales that we were going to lose. But in pharmacy things are not done overnight: R&D takes time. We have worked hard on renewing the portfolio and we have many products launching. Some are already available here in Spain, such as Nubeqa (for prostate cancer) and soon will be Kerendia (for chronic kidney disease), another presentation of Eylea and Acoramidis, a license for heart failure. For this reason, we believe that in two or three years sales will be maintained but our margin will decrease: we have to invest in promotion and licenses have less margin.
The group has also refocused its R&D strategy in recent years.
Yes, this was my second biggest challenge: Bayer had R&D centered in Germany and very focused on small molecules and not so much on the biological part, such as cell or gene therapies. We have changed the focus, and we have made it more efficient and we have bought companies to open ourselves to these scientific advances. One was AskBio, and its Spanish subsidiary Viralgen, which have one of the most advanced viral vector factories in the world in San Sebastián. Also Bluerock.
The medicines that we have in the early phase of research have already changed: we have seven gene and cell therapy programs, biological products, small molecules and new technologies, such as chemoproteomics, through the purchase of the American biotech company Vividion. We continue to be leaders in cardiovascular R&D and we have exploded in oncology, in addition to entering immunology and gene and cell therapies and rare diseases.
In a controversial interview in the ‘Financial Times’, you warned a few months ago that the EU’s pharmaceutical policy was causing innovation to go to China and the United States. Has your opinion changed with the proposal for a pharmaceutical market directive that the European Parliament has approved?
I am the first vice-president of EFPIA (the European Pharmaceutical Industry Association) and I have spent many hours talking to parliamentarians and EC officials about this regulation, which is one of my biggest concerns. The proposal approved by Parliament has improved compared to the Commission’s original project and now has to go to the council of heads of government.
In recent years we have regressed a lot compared to the United States: in 2002 investment there exceeded the European investment by 2,000 million dollars, and now by more than 20,000 million. In Europe we have the best universities, but what is researched here is often transformed into applications, products or companies in the United States, because its capital market is more attractive and because access to patients, with reimbursement, is also more favorable. by insurers, and by higher prices. And now it is China, which pushes innovation and at the same time, gives more favorable access to innovative products to its local market. For Europe it is time to wake up: the pharmaceutical industry still exports more than it imports and we can maintain leadership if we facilitate access to capital to develop biotech companies and a market for new medicines that encourages companies to invest and stay in Europe.
It is paradoxical that this happens, if the EC says that its priority is to promote biotechnology innovation.
Well, we don’t see those aids for innovation. For example, the Commission’s initial proposal regarding the protection of intellectual property was very harmful and the proposal that Parliament has approved reverses those changes, but does not improve what we have today.
However, Bayer continues to invest in Europe. In Spain, for example, they announced a few days ago that they have invested 423 million in five years, and 86 of them last year alone in Viralgen and TAAV, their two advanced therapy centers in San Sebastián. What has led you to invest here?
The decision was made before we purchased AskBio. We value education: we find highly qualified personnel, which we need because they are products that are difficult to handle: they are viral vectors, living entities. Also its location, on the border with France. And the support of the Basque Government, which realized that there was a new technology, which points to the future, because it is not only the investment in a factory but the nucleus for other types of investments. It was quite visionary.
What weight does Spain have for Bayer?
Spain is an important country: we have been around for 125 years, we have sales of 768 million euros and we invest a lot. And it is also an important country for the clinical development of our drugs: it is the third country in Europe and the fifth in the world in which we are most active.
Bayer unites three very different divisions: the pharmacy division, which you direct, the consumer division, and the agricultural business, which grew with the purchase of Monsanto. The group has recently ruled out the possibility of segregating any of these divisions. Don’t you think that the current situation could be harming your pharmaceutical division?
Within the Bayer board we have discussed it a lot and we came to the conclusion that we could better face the challenges together than with a separation, a process that would take years. As we have said, we have to renew the drug portfolio, increasing innovation. We also have to face a high debt, a consequence of the acquisitions we have made, and legal conflicts in the agriculture division. And we want to be more efficient, and we have begun to implement a program to reduce bureaucracy. If we had opted for a separation, it would have been difficult to focus on everything else.
You have been the reference speaker at Pharma 24. What message have you given to the industry executives who have come to Barcelona?
That we have to rethink how we can transform scientific advances into products and companies and get them to patients. Think, for example, of a gene therapy that can slow the progression of Parkinson’s or reverse its damage. We can no longer evaluate the benefit of a medicine by comparing it with that of generic drugs and giving it a similar price, when it saves millions of euros per patient in hospital expenses and social benefits. We would have to set the price differently: for example, not paying for the treatment all at once, but rather like a kind of Netflix, a fee that is paid as long as the positive effects on the patient are maintained. These are questions that we must raise in the face of the arrival of an innovation that completely changes how we treat diseases and that is vital to face some challenges that Europe faces, such as aging.
