Look back at pharma news to Feb 24

Last week saw a bit of catch up on year-end financial results reporting from European drugmakers, including Belgium’s UCB, France’s Ipsen and Germany’s Bayer.

The latter’s  annual conference was the most anticipated, as Bayer is about to see a major transformation with its $66 billion acquisition of GMO giant Monsanto which will substantially increase the group focus on crop sciences, thus far secondary to pharmaceuticals.

Bayer chief executive Werner Baumann stressed at the press conference that the acquisition will not affect its activities across other parts of the company such as its research and development (R&D) in pharma. He added: “Based on the very good business performance, we significantly raised earnings in the pharmaceuticals division, while at the same time increasing our R&D spending by more than 300 million euros.”