German pharmaceutical company Bayer is expanding its U.S. pharma business significantly, despite corporate turmoil and pricing pressures that have led many in the drug industry to bemoan the potential end of the American biotech innovation boom.
Bayer’s C-suite has been on a soul-searching mission for the last year, spurred by new leadership and the realization that the company is, as new CEO Bill Anderson said earlier this month, “badly broken.”
The biggest fissure is the debt and litigation costs stemming from Bayers’s 2018 acquisition of agriculture firm Monsanto, but the aspirin-maker’s pharmaceutical portfolio is also facing strain. Some of Bayer’s top products, including the anticoagulant drug Xarelto and the eye medication Eylea, are under patent pressure. Xarelto is also one of the first drugs to be subject to Medicare price negotiations under the Inflation Reduction Act, though Johnson & Johnson owns U.S. rights to the drug.