Bayer has vowed to become one of the world's top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the field of cancer.

Bayer presented such a vision during the Bayer Pharma Media Day 2023 held at Bayer's headquarters in Germany last Friday.

To this end, Bayer is investing heavily in anticancer drugs.

The company opened Bayer Research and Innovation Center (BRIC) in Cambridge, Boston, Massachusetts, in June of last year by investing $140 million.

Bayer is currently collaborating with the MIT-Harvard Broad Institute on precision molecular oncology research through the BRIC.

Based on such collaboration, Bayer stressed it is developing targeted alpha therapies and next-generation immunotherapies for prostate, gastric, and lung cancer.

Also, Bayer emphasized that together with Vividion Therapeutics, a biotech company it acquired in 2021 for $1.5 billion, it will discover new cancer targets and develop new therapies.

Vividion is conducting research to accelerate targeted cancer programs by constructing a chemoproteomics platform to identify previously unknown binding pockets in undruggable targets.

"Through a connected relationship with Bayer, we've been able to accelerate progress on our pipeline of novel, previously undruggable, high-value oncology target programs, and we look forward to the possibility of delivering multiple programs into the clinic starting mid of this year," Vividion Therapeutics President and CEO Aleksandra Rizo said during the press conference.

Bayer to focus on AI as well

Bayer also announced its intention to further expand the role of artificial intelligence (AI) across its business.

Bayer has already partnered with technology companies such as Google Cloud and Recursion Pharmaceuticals. Bayer is also using Google Cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPU) technology to accelerate its drug discovery process.

Google's TPU is a customized acceleration technology designed to run cutting-edge machine learning models and computationally intensive workloads. It can help accelerate and scale Bayer's quantum chemistry calculations.

Bayer also presented how it is strengthening its drug discovery capabilities through its collaboration with Recursion.

According to Bayer, by combining Recursion's platform technology with Bayer's small molecule compound library, Bayer has strengthened its inferential search capabilities and expanded its digital technology knowledge and scientific expertise for the discovery and development of new drugs.

"AI is already groundbreaking today for us at Bayer and, most importantly, for patients," said Dr. Marion Legler, Head of Data Science & Advanced Analytics, Pharmaceuticals Division at Bayer. "We are focused on leveraging data and AI across the entire lifecycle of our products, enabled by our highly skilled internal teams and targeted collaborations with external partners."

Bayer stressed it would use AI technology for its radiology products as well.

Given the growing demand for medical AI, especially in the field of radiology, the company pledged to expand the market for its Calantic Digital Solutions, which manages the workload of radiologists by effectively improving their ability to read picture archiving and communication systems (PACS).

While the software currently helps diagnose chest and neurological diseases, the company plans to expand AI medical image analysis for other cancers, dementia, and musculoskeletal diseases.

"Our expanding position in medical imaging AI is broadening our comprehensive radiology portfolio, encompassing contrast media, devices, and informatics solutions which generated close to 2 billion euros in sales in 2022," Bayer said.

In line with its goal to expand its AI medical imaging business, Bayer said it has recently acquired Blackford Analysis, a medical AI imaging platform company.