For the second time in as many weeks, Bayer’s consumer health division has formed a precision health partnership centered on encouraging healthy aging.
This time around, the collaboration is with Salus Optima, a London-based developer of artificial intelligence-based digital health tools.
Through their partnership, which the duo announced Thursday, Bayer will apply its global reach and consumer health expertise to Salus Optima’s technology, which allows its partners in consumer health and wellness to customize a user-facing app, coaching portal, content management system and data collection and analysis tools to their own needs.
In Bayer’s case, that’ll see the mobile app helping users to see how their lifestyle choices affect their overall health, while offering data-driven recommendations and support in their efforts to change those behaviors and achieve their health- and wellness-related goals.
“There has never been a better time for our business to support consumer self-care. As the global population ages and we enter an era where many born today will live past 100 years old, understanding and taking action on aging, supported by data and science, is an exciting investment from us to our consumers,” Patricia Corsi, chief marketing and information officer of Bayer’s consumer health division, said in the announcement.
“With the integration of products, platforms, and devices powered by AI, we put self-care front and center for the people we serve with our business,” she continued.
And Bayer isn’t Salus Optima’s only high-profile partner. The company has had a technical collaboration with McLaren Racing since 2020, through which its technology provides around-the-clock personalized health guidance to each of McLaren’s Formula 1 drivers. McLaren has worked with Salus Optima to tailor the app to focus first on battling fatigue, before expanding to help improve race car drivers’ nutrition and physical and mental training.
Meanwhile, Bayer unveiled another partnership around healthy aging just last week. In that case, the healthcare giant’s consumer health division teamed up with another London-based company: Hurdle, which is building an end-to-end remote diagnostic testing solution that, like Salus Optima’s technology, can be customized to each partner’s needs.
In the Nov. 28 announcement, Bayer said it will begin selling Hurdle’s Chronomics Biological Age Test directly to consumers through an e-commerce platform. The at-home saliva test analyzes the epigenetic markers along a patient’s DNA to determine their “biological age,” which can be accelerated by certain behavioral and environmental factors and may indicate a higher risk of certain chronic diseases—but which can also be reduced by making healthier lifestyle changes.
“While aging is common to us all in terms of time, how our bodies age on the inside is unique to each person and can be impacted by many factors including environment, lifestyle and genetics,” said David Evendon-Challis, chief scientific officer and head of R&D for Bayer’s consumer health division. “Enabling people to better understand their unique place in this journey through scientific data is the first step to helping them take proactive steps in supporting their own cellular aging process.”