Q&A: Bayer oncology head Christine Roth talks strategy under new CEO

Under new CEO Bill Anderson, Bayer remains committed to becoming a top 10 oncology player, and the road to doing so will be paved by key partnerships and progress in prostate and gastrointestinal cancers, executives said Wednesday.

Bill Anderson

That could mean “good-sized” acquisitions that hit the company’s “sweet spot” of focus, whether it be a particular modality or patient population, said Christine Roth, head of Bayer’s oncology strategic business unit, during an event at the company’s Research and Innovation Center in Cambridge, MA.

Bayer is focused on filling its early pipeline, Roth added, pointing to a recent partnership with Bicycle Therapeutics in which the company shelled out $45 million upfront. However, the company is willing to be patient to make the right deal.

“We’re not going to do a deal for the sake of doing a deal,” she said. “We’re going to do a deal where we bring something unique to the table, where we have a degree of competence that we will be able to win not just in the regulatory arena, but in the commercialization arena, and where we can have a real meaningful impact for patients.”

Roth sat down with Endpoints News on Wednesday to discuss the company’s business development strategy and oncology ambitions under Anderson’s leadership. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nicole DeFeudis: Bayer has made clear its ambitions to be a top 10 oncology player. What do you see as the next immediate step in the plan?

Christine Roth: The most immediate step is to look at the delivery of our lifecycle opportunities for our in-line pipeline. You got a good example of that last year with the expansion of the darolutamide [Nubeqa] label, and then we’ve got a couple of studies that will read out in the first half of next year.

DeFeudis: You’ve spoken about establishing Nubeqa as a backbone in prostate cancer, that other companies will look to partner with. What would you say are the priority combinations that you’re looking at?

Roth: Early on, it really was a matter of who came to us. Combinations of non-chemo agents are a priority for us. There’s still the big question about I/O in the prostate cancer space, too, so I think we would have to make the choice between our own focus on next-generation I/O and its potential in combination with darolutamide versus an outside-in kind of approach. There’s also a lot of focus on the TRT space … Much focus has been on prostate cancer over the last decade [and] that has brought us to a place where we have multiple drug classes. Now we’re starting to look at combinations amongst those drug classes. There’s still a lot of space for early innovation in prostate cancer.

DeFeudis: Are you mostly looking for earlier-stage assets or mid- or late-stage assets as you’re looking for partnerships?

Roth: It’s always easier to do the early-phase stuff. There’s obviously very intriguing science. It captures people’s imagination. And the deals are usually lower-cost. The idea there is to invest what you need to invest to get to the next stage of decision-making and to fail as fast as possible, so you can move on to something else.

DeFeudis: A few companies have said the Inflation Reduction Act has impacted how they’re thinking about R&D, like making decisions about which programs to take forward. Is that something you’re thinking about at Bayer?

Roth: It’s unfortunate that with the IRA now we have to think about a shorter life cycle, if you will, for the opportunity to see the return on that investment. But it doesn’t mean if it’s the right thing to do, you don’t pursue it … There’s a lot of ways you can react to the environment that we’re in today. You can find ways to accelerate development.

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