An Interview with Bayer's Friedemann Janus: A Third of Drugs in Development Come from China — What Is Bayer Looking For?

China's innovative drugs are reaching deeper into the innovation systems of global pharmaceutical companies.

In recent years, as more and more cases of Chinese innovative drugs entering global markets through license-out have emerged, multinational pharma companies' understanding of Chinese innovation and their ways of collaborating have also been changing. In the past, multinational pharma mostly treated Chinese programs as pipeline assets to be traded: a biotech would first develop a promising product, and the multinational would then bring the program into its own global pipeline through BD (business development) and license-in. Now, more and more multinationals are looking at earlier stages, approaching biotech teams before programs mature to understand their innovation logic and explore possible collaboration.

Bayer offers a window onto this. "We believe China's innovation ecosystem has made great progress over the past few years, and China has become an important source of high-quality innovation," Dr. Friedemann Janus, Senior Vice President of Bayer's Pharmaceuticals Division and Global Head of Regional Business Development, Open Innovation and Co.Lab, said in an interview with VCBeat on September 16. For this multinational, which has more than 140 years of business history in China, China is becoming an increasingly important part of the global innovation landscape.

This shift is also reflected in the innovation network Bayer is building. In September 2024, Bayer Co.Lab landed in Shanghai; in September 2025, the Bayer Co.Lab venture capital alliance was established, bringing venture capital institutions into the network to connect resident startups with more global investors; and in November 2025, Bayer Co.Lab expanded further to Beijing.

Just one day before this interview, 26 Co.Lab resident companies and innovation competition winners from China, the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, and South Korea took part — online and in person — in the first Bayer Co.Lab venture capital alliance global roadshow, launched in Beijing, interacting with more than 20 global investment institutions and dozens of Bayer R&D experts.

For Friedemann Janus, the question is no longer whether China has innovation, but how — as China becomes an increasingly important source of global innovation — multinational pharma should enter this ecosystem earlier, and how it can bring that innovation truly into global R&D, BD, and commercialization systems. This is the question Bayer is trying to answer.

Friedemann Janus's assessment of Chinese innovation is not simple optimism.

In his observation, China's innovative drug industry has gone through a fairly clear evolution. In the early days, Chinese companies were mostly "Me-too"; then came the "Fast-Follow" stage — rapidly catching up with global leading products through faster development speed, higher efficiency, and stronger execution.

But now, this stage is changing again.

"China is now moving from Fast Follower to Best-in-Class very quickly," Friedemann Janus told VCBeat. In his view, although many Chinese companies are not the first to propose a given mechanism or technology path, through speed, efficiency, and creativity they can already develop "very good, even the best, drugs." Friedemann Janus believes this will not be the end point of Chinese innovation.

"We will see First-in-Class innovations emerge from China in the future," Friedemann Janus said. He stressed, however, that First-in-Class requires high-quality basic research, which means the next stage of competition for Chinese innovation involves not only R&D speed and clinical execution efficiency, but also basic research capability.

This is also why he believes "Fast Follow" still has opportunities. As science becomes more complex and competition more intense, innovative drug R&D will not become easier simply because technology advances. On the contrary, how quickly a company can develop products and how it looks for opportunities from a broader scientific perspective will both become part of differentiation.

"Differentiation also comes largely from a company's operating system. How fast is product development pushed forward, or over how broad a scope?" In Friedemann Janus's view, Chinese companies still have advantages in these respects.

This is one of the important reasons he judges that China will play a more significant role in the global pharmaceutical innovation ecosystem.

"China will play a very important role in the global innovation ecosystem," Friedemann Janus said, noting that Bayer has already seen more and more innovation from China enter global new drug pipelines. At the same time, scientific innovation is becoming more difficult, yet substantial unmet clinical needs remain worldwide, which means collaboration across different innovation ecosystems will become more important.

If the change in the quality of Chinese innovation is the basis for Friedemann Janus's judgment about China's importance, then Co.Lab is the concrete way Bayer enters this ecosystem.

Bayer Co.Lab, a co-creation platform, officially landed in China in September 2024, aiming to build an ecosystem cluster spanning diverse frontier technology platforms and innovation tracks. In China today, Bayer Co.Lab has completed its strategic footprint in Zhangjiang, Shanghai and the Beijing International Pharmaceutical Innovation Park, with 13 startups now resident, building a diversified biopharmaceutical innovation cluster covering small molecules, nucleic acid drugs, cyclic peptide drugs, antibody platforms, gene therapy, AI drug discovery, membrane protein technology, and other innovative technologies and tracks.

Describing Bayer Co.Lab's role in China, Friedemann Janus stressed a few key words: "understanding startups and early-stage innovation earlier and more deeply."

In the traditional BD model, a biotech often has to wait until its asset reaches a relatively mature clinical stage before establishing formal business contact with a multinational. Bayer Co.Lab is moving that point earlier.

"We want to understand these companies as early and as deeply as possible," Friedemann Janus said. For Bayer, this early connection does not mean that every resident company of Bayer Co.Lab must ultimately strike a deal with Bayer. Rather, Bayer hopes that earlier contact will help it understand a company's innovation, founding team, and development direction — and lead to a more natural path to collaboration in the future.

This makes Bayer Co.Lab different from an incubator in the traditional sense.

In Friedemann Janus's view, what Bayer offers these young companies is not just lab space or resource connections, but more importantly the sharing of experience and mentoring built on a multinational's long accumulated BD expertise.

For example, when a biotech faces a global pharmaceutical company for the first time, how should it pitch? What should be said and what should not? What questions might the other side ask? How should it answer questions about the competitive landscape, product differentiation, and future commercialization prospects?

"Bayer has rich experience and mature judgment in these scenarios," Friedemann Janus said, adding that Bayer hopes to share these insights with young entrepreneurs.

This capability also extends to helping local companies go global.

Friedemann Janus stressed that Bayer Co.Lab does not directly take part in a company's regulatory registration, clinical, or CMC (chemistry, manufacturing, and controls) work, but that Bayer can offer professional advice through expert mentoring and consulting — bringing senior experts in fields such as global drug registration to China to meet companies face to face and provide specific guidance and recommendations on relevant issues.

"These are extremely valuable recommendations," Friedemann Janus said with a smile.

What Friedemann Janus refers to is the deep experience Bayer's global team has accumulated in new drug R&D, BD collaboration, and commercialization. For many biotechs still at an early stage, what Bayer Co.Lab provides is not just shared office and lab space — more importantly, it gives founding teams the chance to connect early with a multinational's global resource network and to understand how multinationals evaluate new drug assets, how they judge BD opportunities, and how deals get done.

From this angle, Bayer is doing more than sourcing projects: it is extending the BD touchpoint upstream along the new drug innovation value chain — engaging with companies before assets mature, understanding scientific mechanisms and technologies before programs enter deal negotiations, and building mutual understanding and trust before a transaction happens. For Bayer, this means discovering innovation does not have to start only once a program enters the BD market, and partnerships are not established only after a deal is struck.

This is exactly why Friedemann Janus repeatedly emphasizes the value of Chinese innovation. In his view, China is no longer just an important commercial market; it is also becoming an important source of external innovation for Bayer. With about one-third of new drugs in development worldwide coming from China, how to enter China's innovation ecosystem earlier is taking on a different meaning for Bayer's global innovation layout.

Bayer's recognition of the value of Chinese innovation may also be borne out, from another angle, by how often its global team shows up in China.

Friedemann Janus told VCBeat that over the past two years, more and more colleagues from Bayer's global team have come to China to attend industry conferences, ecosystem events, and exchanges with partners in person. "Our focus on China has increased markedly over the past two years, and it will strengthen further. Only by truly integrating into the local innovation ecosystem and continuously engaging with companies, research institutions, and industry partners can we spot noteworthy innovation earlier."

If Bayer Co.Lab answers the question of how to find innovation earlier, then another of Friedemann Janus's judgments about BD points to the most easily overlooked question once innovation is found: how does a deal actually create value?

With Chinese innovative drug BD increasingly active, industry attention may focus mainly on upfront payments, milestone amounts, and total deal value — but in Friedemann Janus's view, these are only the starting point of a partnership. Most of a deal's value is created after the deal closes. What truly determines whether a collaboration keeps generating value is how the two sides advance the program together after signing.

This means BD does not end once a program is "delivered" to a multinational. Drug development cycles are long, new data keep emerging after a program enters clinical trials, and R&D strategy, resource allocation, and program priorities may all change. The two sides must continuously face new decisions, and the original contract cannot possibly capture every future uncertainty.

That is why, in Bayer's deal system, the alliance management team is not a role that appears only after a deal closes — it joins the deal team earlier, and even takes part in contract negotiations. Friedemann Janus noted that when doing a deal, one should simultaneously consider future alliance management: how the two sides will make decisions together, what rights each holds, how information will be shared, and how disagreements will be coordinated.

For Chinese biotechs, this deserves particular attention, because it is after a license-out deal closes that the relationship between a Chinese company and a global pharmaceutical company truly enters a long-term partnership phase. As R&D advances, both sides' understanding of the program may keep changing, and the originally agreed path may need adjustment. Without an effective communication and decision-making mechanism, even a completed deal may not truly unlock the asset's potential value.

"What happens after the deal is very important; more value is created after the deal and through subsequent collaboration." This judgment from Friedemann Janus also brings BD back from work that appears to focus on deal terms to a more central question in innovative drug commercialization: how to realize the full potential value of an innovative asset over a long R&D process.

The same judgment shows in Bayer's understanding of early-stage innovation. Take IIT (investigator-initiated trials) as an example. Betty Huang, Vice President of Bayer's Pharmaceuticals Division and Head of the China Collaboration and Innovation Center, believes that well-regulated IITs can improve the credibility of research data — a positive change for BD and due diligence. But when it comes to actually judging a licensing transaction, IITs remain more of a reference; as the in-licensing party, a multinational generally needs to combine animal studies, traditional preclinical evidence, and, more importantly, human data to make its judgment. There is also no set of IIT metrics that can be simply applied across different diseases and different R&D stages. For the in-licensing party, what really matters is not any single data point, but gradually building overall confidence in an asset as R&D work progresses.

For this reason, Friedemann Janus still stresses looking for opportunities at different stages of the innovation chain. For Bayer, as a company that takes the long view, this means seeking innovation at different R&D stages and from different regions around the world. For early-stage programs, that requires a multinational to understand a company's innovation, founding team, and development direction earlier, and to look for strategic fit between the two sides in the process.

And China is becoming an important source in this global search. Friedemann Janus said he has seen Chinese innovative drugs evolve from "Me-too" and "Fast Follow" in the past toward Best-in-Class and even First-in-Class. As scientific innovation grows more complex while unmet clinical needs persist worldwide, collaboration across different innovation ecosystems will become more important.

So what Bayer is looking for in China is no longer just one mature program after another, ready to be put on the deal table. It wants to engage with startups earlier, understand scientific mechanisms, connect with global resource networks, and then advance programs through BD collaboration and subsequent alliance management — turning this into a complete collaborative innovation methodology. Bayer Co.Lab addresses the need to discover innovation earlier; BD addresses how to collaborate; and alliance management addresses how to realize value after the deal.

This also gives the "one-third" figure another layer of meaning. When a multinational starts looking for global innovation assets in China, the real competition is no longer just between programs — it also includes who can discover earlier, understand more deeply, and ultimately bring Chinese innovation into global R&D and collaboration systems.