Bayer is making a big digital health play

Bayer is making a big digital health play Chris Newmarker

Bayer announced that it has launched a business unit that will focus on precision digital health products across a range of everyday health categories.

Bayer will prioritize developing digital solutions that enable people to make more informed health choices based on personal insights and novel delivery mechanisms, the company said in a news release posted yesterday.

A company spokesperson wasn’t able to disclose the size of the investment to MassDevice — but added that Bayer is investing in pipeline project development, IT infrastructure, strategic partnerships and personnel to rapidly scale up new innovations across the company’s categories.

The move could be a big deal considering Bayer’s size. The German pharma and biotech giant had sales of €50.7 billion (roughly $53 billion) in 2022. Its pharmaceuticals division is the 16th largest pharma business in the world, according to our sister site Drug Discovery & Development‘s Pharma 50 rankings. (In comparison, Medtronic — the largest medtech company in the world — had $31.2 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year.)

Joe Mullings, CEO of medtech and life sciences search firm The Mullings Group, predicted at our DeviceTalks Boston show in early May that he thinks medical device manufacturers are going to fumble away chronic disease management opportunities to pharmaceutical companies in the near term.

“I think you’re going to see the pharmaceutical companies get into that front-end RPM remote patient monitoring, managing the disease state at home, even potentially catching it subclinically. And they’re gonna take that enormous pie that’s growing over the next 10 to 15 years away from the device world,” Mullings said.

“They have more PhDs than med device does. They understand disease states better than med device does. They got deeper pockets than med device does. And remote patient monitoring is not a tough nut to crack. And it feeds into their pharma model really well.”

Get the full story on our sister site, MassDevice.

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