Boehringer Ingelheim is launching a new research and development (R&D) strategy and a five-year R&D investment program in which the company pledges to invest a total of EUR 11 billion ($11.2 billion) in its new R&D program over the next five years.

Of the total investment, EUR 5 billion ($5.3 billion) will go to preclinical R&D with EUR 1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) thereof planned for collaborations with external partners. The new R&D strategy embraces open innovation in the form of external collaborations to better leverage emerging science and Boehringer Ingelheim's experience and capabilities for the discovery of new medicines.

bilateral collaboration agreements with academic investigators and biotechnology companies provide important starting points for drug discovery projects. Boehringer Ingelheim has entered into several new research collaborations.

The company has new collaborations with four major scientific partners to enrich R&D with novel therapeutic approaches for patients suffering from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), namely the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Massachusetts General Hospital, Scripps Research Institute and Weill Cornell Medicine. These four collaborations aim to identify and validate potential new therapeutic targets as well as identify biomarkers that offer the potential to address the significant unmet medical needs of patients suffering from IBD such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Boehringer Ingelheim has also recently signed exclusive agreements with Hanmi Pharmaceuticals in Korea to develop a third generation EGFR-targeted therapy for lung cancer and with Circuit Therapeutics, California to apply the technique of optogenetics to find new treatments for psychiatric disorders and cardiometabolic diseases.

With respect to public-private partnerships, the company points to examples, such as the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC), the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and the G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) Consortium. Boehringer Ingelheim is an active participant in all two of these public-private partnerships and recently joined the GPCR Consortium.

The company also has crowdsourcing initiatives with InnoCentive and the BioMed X Innovation Center. Boehringer Ingelheim and the BioMed X Innovation Center recently announced that they are bringing together scientists at an academic center of excellence in Heidelberg, Germany, and providing them with appropriate infrastructure and mentorship to work on new epigenetic approaches to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

In addition, Boehringer Ingelheim invests in the Institute for Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna to support basic research, and a global network of scientists Finally, the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, founded in 2010 with an initial financial commitment of EUR 100 million ($107 million) is currently investing in a portfolio of 13 different start-up companies with exciting new therapeutic ideas.

Source: Boehringer Ingelheim