Bayer HealthCare to ally with Harvard and MIT on heart disease research

Bayer HealthCare will be expanding its collaboration with the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to encompass heart disease research.

The goal of this new aspect of the alliance is to leverage insights from human genetics to help create new cardiovascular therapies and discover new drugs.

Bayer HealthCare and the Broad Institute will collaborate on genetic discovery, target validation and drug discovery activities. Governance for the alliance will be led by a joint steering and research committee that will oversee the overall direction.

Cardiovascular genomics is an emerging field of cardiology that uses genomic information to characterise disease risk and identify new therapeutic targets for drug discovery.

Professor Andreas Busch, head of global drug discovery and member of the executive committee of Bayer HealthCare, said: "We have been collaborating over the last two years and have developed a very constructive partnership during this time."

Bayer is currently moving to make life sciences the core focus of its business, with the ongoing success of its HealthCare division to play a key role in this shift.