The Alliance Between the German Cancer Research Center and Bayer: A Retrospective of an Innovative Collaboration Model

In 2009, the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the biopharmaceutical company Bayer AG initiated an academic-industry co-discovery collaboration. The partners combined their expertise in tumor biology and drug discovery to identify and validate novel targets for cancer treatment. In the early phase of the Alliance, the focus was on target identification and validation projects. Over time, both partners realized that they could also successfully collaborate on later stages of drug discovery. As a result over the past few years, and following several contract extensions, the two partners have collaborated on several late-stage drug discovery projects. This has resulted in the achievement of several drug discovery milestones and the initiation of early clinical trials, the most recent in 2022. This success has been possible thanks to both partners' understanding of each other's needs and challenges. They jointly developed solutions to issues such as the intrinsic potential conflict of early publishing versus patent protection. Both partners also appreciated the risks involved in some of the experiments, such as starting a joint laboratory for immune-therapy with scientists from both parties working bench-to-bench. Recently, despite these successes the partners decided to terminate the Alliance, as Bayer AG wants to focus its activities on the development of its late pipeline.