Bayer opens a health and nutrition innovation center in Barcelona

The multinational Bayer has created LifeHub, a health and nutrition innovation center to accelerate innovative projects that contribute to the transformation of health and agriculture, essential areas for the company's activity. Located at the Sant Joan Despí headquarters, the center will have 650 square meters starting in the second half of 2022.

The team of professionals assigned to this area will work in coordination with the local innovation and research ecosystem to identify and develop viable proposals in the fields of digital therapies and agricultural transformation. Specifically, regarding food, the company will work on the Mediterranean crop model for the integration of aspects such as the digitalization of agriculture or the use of biologics, in the advance towards a sustainable agriculture model.

LifeHub will allow intensifying this knowledge transfer work that it has already been carrying out as a participant in different programs and initiatives, such as Barcelona Health Hub (BHH) or the The Collider program of the Mobile World Capital Barcelona (MWCapital), in which it accompanies some teams in the development and launch of their products. Likewise, in the agricultural aspect, the Digital Pest Advisor program for the automatic identification of pests using cameras or the Environmental Impact Reduction for the improvement of agricultural practices through predictive models stand out.

By collaborating with these entities, LifeHub Barcelona is part of an innovation environment that allows obtaining solutions in health and nutrition that can respond to the main challenges currently facing society. Likewise, from Sant Joan Despí, work will be intensified with other Bayer innovation centers in the Mediterranean cluster, located in Seville and Almería.

Bernardo Kanahuati, CEO of Bayer in Spain and Portugal, highlights the creation of the research center as a collaborative environment with key actors in the fields of digital therapies and agricultural transformation, with the aim of helping to identify and develop viable proposals that can contribute to improving people's lives.

LifeHub is a space located in Barcelona, but it "works on projects and areas with enormous potential for global impact," company sources assure. In this sense, it will work in coordination with the global teams of each of the areas within the Bayer organization and at the forefront of any potential development that may fit into other global projects such as Leaps by Bayer.

Second center of excellence

With the new LifeHub, Bayer reaffirms its commitment to Sant Joan Despí, a site that has already housed a Shared Services Center (SSC) for more than 15 years, performing administrative and Information Technology tasks for the entire multinational, covering the needs of 29 countries in Europe and Latin America. The SSC currently has a staff of 600 employees, from 35 nationalities.