Tsinghua University and Bayer Healthcare signed a strategic cooperation agreement on March 26, aiming to extend the research of the Tsinghua – Bayer Innovative Medicine Joint Research Center, and to carry out joint research in the following three years in the areas of biomedicine. Shi Yigong, Dean of the School of Life Sciences and the Executive Vice Dean of School of Medicine, and Andreas Busch, member of the Bayer HealthCare Executive Committee and Head of Global Drug Discovery, signed the agreement on behalf of Tsinghua University and Bayer HealthCare.
Tsinghua Vice President Yuan Si attended the signing ceremony and spoke highly of the research work of Tsinghua – Bayer Innovative Medicine Joint Research Center. He said that the joint research center has become an effective platform for the communication between researchers from Bayer HealthCare and Tsinghua University.
Andreas Busch said that the agreement would follow in the footsteps of previous successful collaborations and re-iterated the importance of these Chinese market in Bayer’s innovation strategy.
The joint research center has already carried out various research collaborative projects, ranging from early stage R&D collaboration, to understanding of pathology, target detection for new medicines, research on biological structures, and medicinal chemistry.
Shi Yigong said that the continued collaboration would focus on structural biology and that scientists from Tsinghua University and Bayer HealthCare would work together to figure out the 3D protein structures of biological molecule targets for the development of new medicines.
A chair professor program sponsored by Bayer has also been established in the School of Medicine of Tsinghua University. Dr. Dong Chen was selected as the first chair professor to be elected, based on his achievements and reputation in the area of immunology. This is the first time that Bayer has sponsored a chair professor in the areas of life sciences in China.
The Tsinghua – Bayer Innovative Medicine Joint Research Center was co-established in 2009 by the School of Medicine, Tsinghua University and Bayer HealthCare, with the renowned structural biologist Prof. Shi Yigong as the director of the joint research center.
Bayer is a global enterprise with a core competence in areas such as healthcare, nutrition and hi-tech materials. Bayer HealthCare, a Bayer Group company, with headquarters located in Leverkusen, Germany, is a leading innovative medicine company in the world. In 2011, its income reached 17.2 billion Euros.
