Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH pledged to invest €11 billion (US$11.8 billion) in a new R&D program over the next five years, with plans to devote nearly half to preclinical work and €1.5 billion (US$1.6 billion) to collaborations with external partners. The German company said it will look not only within the company, but also to academic partners, public entities and individual researchers in an embrace of open innovation models with the goal of exploring emerging science, new indications and new technology to expand its opportunities.

Last year, Boehringer spent about €2.65 billion (US$2.85 billion) on R&D, equating to about 19.9 percent of its €13.32 billion (US$14.31 billion) in net sales and about a 100 million less than the €2.75 billion (US$2.94 billion) it spent on R&D in 2013. If divided equally over five years, the new target spend would equate to about €2.2 billion (US$2.4 billion) per year, an amount that is lower by contrast with the two most recent years due to the inclusion in those years of expenses related to new launches and the associated phase III registration studies, Boehringer told BioWorld Today.

“With 11 new launches in 2014 and 2015, our R&D organization is an example of Boehringer Ingelheim’s outstanding capability in this field,” said Professor Andreas Barner, chairman of the Ingelheim, Germany-based company’s board of managing directors. “The new program and strategy reflect our corporate philosophy of long-term, sustainable growth,” he said. After 24 years at Boehringer Barner will retire from the board at the end of June 2016 and move to the company’s shareholders’ committee.

The company’s success in launching new products is part of a larger picture in which the number of new molecular entities first-world launches in the global market has trended higher during the past three years, with 46 first-world launches in 2014, the highest in over a decade, according to Thomson Reuters CMR Factbook. At the same time, there has been a decline in early development pipelines across the industry and a declining number of terminated projects in phase III — a trend that points to the biopharmaceutical industry’s ability to “fail fast, fail cheaply,” the Factbook points out. Give how much of Boehringer’s planned R&D spend is oriented toward preclinical work, its strategy appears to fit within that picture.

The company reported revenue has trended lower during the past few years, hitting €14.69 billion in 2012, but then falling to €14.07 billion in 2013 and €13.32 billion in 2014.

The company said it will seek to build on its long-term experience in its core therapeutic areas, including unresolved challenges in immunology, respiratory and cardiometabolic medicine, oncology and diseases of the central nervous system. But it will also ramp up efforts to work “embed a range of innovative opportunities in its R&D endeavors” by working with a range of scientific partners.

Among its endeavors will be a series of bilateral collaboration agreements with academic investigators and biotechnology companies that will provide important starting points for drug discovery projects, the company said. Among those projects, four new inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)-focused research collaborations that are part of the new over-arching R&D strategy were announced Tuesday.

With the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Boehringer will interrogate both adaptive and innate immune response mechanisms that may be unique to both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. High-throughput chemical and genetic screening capabilities will be used in a collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital to uncover new mechanisms at the host-environment interface that are compromised in patients with IBD. With Scripps Research Institute, the company will seek a deeper understanding of the role of specific bacterial enzymes in the onset of ulcerative colitis. The focus of the fourth program, at Weill Cornell Medicine, is an integrated preclinical and translational research program related to certain defined cellular processes and targets that regulate the maintenance of the gut mucosal barrier in healthy and IBD-affected patients. Terms of the collaborations were not disclosed.

Boehringer has also recently signed exclusive agreements with Seoul, Korea-based Hanmi Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd. to develop a third generation EGFR-targeted therapy for lung cancer and with Menlo Park. Calif.-based Circuit Therapeutics Inc. in which the partners agreed to work for three year on applying the technique of optogenetics to find new treatments for psychiatric disorders and cardiometabolic diseases. The Hanmi deal, first announced in July, is part of a string of recent partnerships including the Korean company, which more recently has attracted new deals with Sanofi SA and Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc. (See BioWorld Today, Nov. 11, 2015.)

Public-private partnerships also feature in Boehringer’s plans, with the company highlighting its ongoing participation in the Structural Genomics Consortium, Innovative Medicines Initiative and the G-protein coupled receptor Consortium. All three efforts “are playing an increasingly important role in medicines discovery because of their ability to bring together the best academic and industrial scientists in an unrestricted precompetitive field,” said.

The old family-owned company, founded in 1885, is also exploring some new tricks, looking to crowdsourcing initiatives with organizations such as Innocentive Inc. and Biomed X Innovation, a Heidelberg, Germany-based lab located on the campus of the University of Heidelberg that Boehringer is providing with infrastructure and mentorship to work on new epigenetic approaches to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.