Sanofi CEO Chris Viehbacher was just fired by the Sanofi Board. Viebacher was previously head of the US business for GSK. When Andrew Witty was appointed as CEO at GSK, Viebacher jumped ship for Sanofi. But he apparently brought with him Witty’s and GSK’s passion for antibiotic R&D.
The story of
antibiotics at Sanofi is a very mixed one.
At the time of the Sanofi merger with Aventis, Aventis was in the midst
of spinning off its entire antibiotic research unit in Paris. Sanofi, then under the direction of
Jean-Francois Dehecq, and after much debate, completed the spin-off to form
Novexel in December, 2004. Novexel was
purchased by AstraZeneca in 2009 in a complicated deal with support from and
obligations to Forest (now Actavis). Hence, all those Sanofi assets, some after
considerable development at Novexel, went to AstraZeneca and Forest. One of those assets was the compound now
called avibactam, which has just completed its phase III trials in
intra-abdominal infection and should be approved next year.
Enter Viehbacher
2008. He quickly decides that exiting
antibiotic R&D was a big mistake and he tries to restart the group at
Sanofi’s research site in Toulouse, France.
Under his new R&D head, Elias Zerhouni, (an academic researcher who
headed the NIH in the US for a number of years under George W. Bush) they hire
a new head of anti-infectives research.
Around the same
time, with pressure from patent losses, Viehbacher and Sanofi developed a grand
plan to reduce costs and increase research productivity by closing research
sites in France and moving more research to their new Boston site at their
newly acquired Genzyme affiliate. But this led to protests from everyone in
France from the government on down to Sanofi employees threatened with job
losses. As
a result of this political pressure, their plan went from something like
2500 jobs cut to 800 and counting. Having worked as an executive in France (but
based in the US) – I can only empathize with Sanofi management. France is not a very business-friendly place
and necessary strategic restructuring is challenging in the best of times. Part
of this plan involved closing their research site at Toulouse where the nascent
anti-infectives research group is located.
Within less than two years their new head of anti-infectives resigned. The
group was left in better shape in terms of their understanding of
anti-infective R&D but worrying about their future either in Toulouse or
possibly in Lyon. The departure of
Viehbacher can only add to their anxiety.
Since 2008,
anti-infectives research in Toulouse has produced no projects in late stage
development. While this is not surprising given that they had to restart
essentially from nothing and given the turmoil of the last six years, it
remains disappointing. Perhaps their
most important foray in external collaborations was their agreement
with Rib-X (now Melinta) in 2011 for novel antibiotics targeting the ribosomes
of Gram-negative superbugs. But this apparently led nowhere and the collaboration
was dissolved in 2013.
With the departure
of Viehbacher, the Sanofi board has apparently already approached Pascal Soriot,
the current CEO of AstraZeneca – who wants out of the antibiotic R&D
business. Luckily (as far as I am
concerned), he was not interested in Sanofi.
And there, who can blame him given the travails of running a business in
France? My big question is – what will happen to antibiotic R&D in the next
version of Sanofi? Will they regroup and
make progress or will they join the legions of other companies abandoning the
area? As always, we await further
developments.
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