The latest news from German pharma, including why Merck KGaA is looking to life science M&A; positive outlooks for Bayer and STADA; BioNTech’s move into the AI lab assistant space with Google DeepMind; and the recipe to fix the country’s ailing healthcare system.
Germany’s Merck open to more M&A for its Life Science division (Reuters)
Oct 17 (Reuters) – German science and technology group Merck (MRCG.DE), opens new tab is open to more acquisitions for its Life Science business after announcing in May it would buy Mirus Bio for $600 million, it said ahead of its Capital Markets day on Thursday.
“Our guiding principle is and always has been, the right target, at the right time, for the right price,” CEO Belen Garijo said in a statement.
“For larger future transactions, Merck is focusing on the Life Science business sector,” the firm added.
Bayer reaps benefits of demand for new cancer and kidney medicines (EuroNews)
German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG released its second quarter and half year 2024 earnings on Tuesday morning, with the company seeing an average performance in the second quarter, due to the agricultural market environment becoming tougher.
This led to the company seeing increased sales, but falling earnings in the second quarter of 2024.
The Bayer Group saw group sales of €11.1bn for the second quarter this year, which was a 3.1% rise on a currency and portfolio-adjusted basis. Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) before special items in Q2 2024 was €2.1bn, which was a fall of 16.5%.
DeepMind and BioNTech build AI lab assistants for scientific research (FT)
Google DeepMind and BioNTech are building AI lab assistants to help researchers plan scientific experiments and better predict their outcomes as companies race to find specialised applications for energy and data-intensive artificial intelligence models.
Sir Demis Hassabis, chief of Google’s AI arm, is leading the company’s efforts to develop a specialised AI model to act as a research assistant, helping scientists to collaborate across disciplines and make unexpected connections more easily.
Stada reports rosy earnings as CEO tempers expectations around possible sale, IPO (Fierce Pharma)
“Together with our 11,500 employees, my focus is on keeping Stada on a record-breaking trajectory in the second half of the year and growing faster than our competitors,” Stada Arzneimittel’s CEO, Peter Goldschmidt, said in a statement Wednesday.
As Stada Arzneimittel’s private equity owners continue to weigh their options around a potential sale or public offering, the German drugmaker gave a good indication Wednesday of exactly what it can bring to the table.
Over the first six months of the year, Stada generated sales of 2.02 billion euros ($2.2 billion), growing revenues 9% compared with the same period in 2023, the company said in a release. For the same period that ended June 30, Stada grew earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization by 11% to 465.3 million euros ($515 million).
Fresenius Kabi and Cellular Origins agree CGT manufacture automation (Pharmaceutical Technology)
The initiative aims to enhance production efficiency and reduce the risk of human error-induced inconsistencies.
The development agreement will see Fresenius Kabi’s cell therapy processing technologies integrated into Cellular Origins’ robotic platform. Credit: Kotin/Shutterstock.
Fresenius Kabi and Cellular Origins have announced a partnership to advance the field of cell and gene therapy (CGT) by automating the manufacturing process.
Fresenius Kabi’s cell therapy processing technologies will be integrated into Cellular Origins’ Constellation robotic platform.
The partnership’s primary objective is to streamline the production of cell therapies at scale, maintaining the use of developers’ preferred tools for processing.
This initiative automates the production of advanced therapies, aiming to enhance production efficiency and reduce the risk of human error-induced inconsistencies.
How to fix Germany’s ailing health care system (Deutsche Welle)
The German parliament has passed a law aiming to reorganize the health sector, slashing the number of hospitals, boosting clinics and digitalizing bureaucracy. Health Minister Karl Lauterbach called it a “revolution.”
In Germany, financial pressure forces hospitals to perform as many operations as they can, even if they are poorly qualified to carry them outImage: Felix Kästle/dpa/picture alliance
To hear Karl Lauterbach describe it, it is nothing short of a revolution. Speaking at an annual doctors’ conference in early May, the German health minister said the reform plans they had been working on for two years marked a “Zeitenwende” (turning of the times) in German health care — an allusion to the military overhaul Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced after Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The law on the restructuring of the hospital sector was passed by the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, on October 17, 2024. It now has to pass the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat.
