“Sanofi has rather disinvested in research and development compared to competitors”explained on Wednesday May 4 on franceinfo Frédéric Bizard, professor of economics at ESCP Business School, founding president of the Health Institute, after Sanofi recognized a failure in the development of an anti-Covid vaccine.
franceinfo: How do you explain Sanofi’s failure to develop a vaccine against Covid-19?
Frederic Bizard: This failure is linked to decisions that were taken ten years ago. The innovation capacity of pharmaceutical laboratories is linked to investments in research and development and to the effectiveness of this research implemented over the last ten years. When we analyze what happened, Sanofi has rather disinvested in research and development compared to competitors. Ten years ago, Sanofi invested about as much as a group like Roche, which today invests twice as much, about 14 billion against 7 billion for Sanofi.
“Sanofi missed the turn of biotechnologies and favored external growth through the acquisition of companies.”
Frédéric Bizard, professor of economicsat franceinfo
It was a low-paying choice that led to this and other failures.
Sanofi speaks of an unusual time contraction. What does that mean ?
It’s a matter of research and development productivity. At a time when it was necessary to put the company under pressure and find an innovation in one year instead of several years, Sanofi did not respond. Sanofi is more of a conglomerate than a single strategy-driven company. There, this conglomerate proved unable to put its reserves under tension to release a product quickly. Those who have succeeded are rather biotechnology companies that are quite recent. Sanofi’s failure is not isolated. It is the failure of most of the big pharmas which proved unable to be efficient enough in a short time to innovate.
What does this say about the French pharmaceutical industry?
The failure of Sanofi is a French failure of the research and development ecosystem, of the French industrial ecosystem which was absent for vaccines, for therapeutic molecules.
“There has not been a single French company that has developed a product related to messenger RNA, which was discovered in France in the 1960s.”
Frederic Bizardat franceinfo
If we look at BioNtech and Moderna, they have been working on this technological platform for more than 10 years. So there is a real problem in the French ecosystem which goes from research, which is insufficiently linked to hospitals, to universities. There must be a will on the part of the French public authorities to make health a strategic sector for the future. That’s what is really missing and we have to debureaucratize all that.