In August 2026, presenting Bayer's half-year results, chief executive Bill Anderson assured the market the company was “operationally on track”. Behind the reassurance stood a number the company is still navigating. Xarelto, the blood thinner that for a decade had been the company’s best-selling medicine, was down 42 per cent year on year; Eylea, the eye drug that is Bayer’s other great earner, down 33 per cent. Both were being hollowed out by expiring patents, exactly as forecast. Xarelto’s main European patent went in April 2024, and the drug lost €1bn to €1.5bn of US revenue in 2025 alone. Eylea comes off patent in Europe in 2027. A company worth roughly €100bn was staring at a hole it could not fill with more chemistry. Its answer runs through something newer and riskier: a bet on cell and gene therapy.
The 2019 decision
Chief executive Bill Anderson, in the job since June 2023, is the pragmatist who inherited the problem. The answer he is betting on, though, was chosen before he arrived. In 2019 Bayer set a new strategy for its pharmaceutical division: to become a top-ten oncology company and, alongside it, a leader in the emerging field of cell and gene therapy. The field was young enough that the assets that mattered were still independent and, for a determined buyer, available.
Rather than build the capability, Bayer bought it. The buying fell to Marianne De Backer, then Bayer Pharma’s chief business officer, who assembled a great part of Bayer’s cell and gene toolbox before leaving in 2023 to run a US biotech in San Francisco.