Bayer HealthCare and Broad Institute agree cancer alliance

Bayer HealthCare has announced a new strategic alliance with the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts that will focus on the development of new cancer therapies.

The goal of the collaboration will be to jointly discover and develop therapeutic agents that selectively target cancer genome alterations over a period of five years, leveraging the Broad Institute's oncogenomic expertise.

Oncogenomics is a promising field of cancer research that deals with the identification and characterisation of genes associated with the disease, providing new insights into diagnostic methods, ways of predicting clinical outcomes and potential new targets for cancer therapies.

Both parties will be involved in decision-making and will have equal rights to the research findings, with each organisation set to explore its compound library and use its screening platforms and medicinal chemistry expertise to benefit the joint projects.

Professor Andreas Busch, head of global drug discovery and a member of the executive committee of Bayer HealthCare, said: "The alliance is another significant step underlining our engagement in the field of oncology and personalised medicine."

This comes after the firm announced an alliance with Compugen on the development of antibody-based therapeutics for cancer immunotherapy applications last month.