Bayer Corrals U.S. Bio Clusters On Both Coasts

By Wayne Koberstein, Executive Editor, Life Science Leader
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San Francisco and Boston — biopharma rivals or allies? To Bayer, at least, they may be both. As the leading industry clusters in the United States, the two towns are alive with competition but equally rooted in collaboration. The cities, always neck-and-neck in pushing the sector’s growth, also have mirrored each other as vital centers of banking, academia, and high-tech enterprise. Although Bayer has long maintained a strong business-development presence on the U.S. West Coast, sited in the City by the Bay, it more recently established a new base in the burgeoning bio community of Boston, surely the main buzz on the bio-buzzing East Coast. The innovation centers work cooperatively with each other and with the company’s other sites around the world to land new partners, products, and technologies that power the pipeline. But they also work apart, each according to its own configuration. Here we speak with the two people who respectively run the company’s U.S. coast-based innovation centers: Christopher Haskell in the west and Chandra Ramanathan in the east.