Several laboratories now offer vaccines against the coronavirus using biotechnology.

While they seem to become essential, the relative failure of Sanofi and the abandonment of Pasteur, in France, question.

Is the country's backwardness on these subjects irreparable? 

Biotech could be the future of pharmaceutical research but in France, the account is not there.

The Sanofi vaccine, which uses a method other than the innovative messenger RNA, is delayed and will not be released before the "last quarter" of 2021. And Pasteur announced this week to give up its own product.

Only Valneva, a Nantes start-up using these technologies, is still on the right track.

But for reasons of funding and innovation, biotech does not seem to be one of the priorities of French research.

A lack of innovation ...

If, as it hopes, the Sanofi group succeeds in releasing its vaccine at the end of the year, it will be the only big name in the pharmacy to do it alone.

But its backwardness in the field of biotechs will remain.

According to a specialist in the sector, “creativity is no longer“ in traditional laboratories. ”They only get started on what is almost certain to succeed and lead to big profits.

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So radical innovation is left to start-ups, like Valneva, which manage to emerge thanks to opportunities like the coronavirus crisis.

This is in part what caused the current situation, and that Sanofi or Pasteur did not believe enough in the technique of messenger RNA.

Sanofi has all the same allied itself with a small biotech, Translate bio, but without great results for the moment.

At the same time, Pfizer has put billions of euros into a partnership with the German company BioNtech.

... and a lack of resources

In France, the State finances public research and helps private research through the research tax credit.

But he never helps a particular project.

So Valnéva, Sanofi or Pasteur are all in the same boat and the government was unable to follow up on the call from the Nantes start-up.

This "contacted a number of governments in April. What we needed was to secure funding in July to launch the construction of the plant and clinical trials and it is the United Kingdom that has reacted the fastest, ”explains its CEO Franck Grimaud. 

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In addition, the insufficient funding of large public research institutions creates a chronic lack of resources in France.

Conversely, in the United States, universities specializing in health care have colossal resources.

This is why the best biotech companies are there and they are bought for several billion euros as soon as they show promising results.

Finally, France has halved its market share in pharmacy worldwide between 2005 and 2015. Some, at the Ministry of the Economy, believe that too much has been done in recent years to have, in particular, drugs. the cheapest possible.

According to an adviser, we had a budgetary approach that does not make large groups want to look in France.

What partly explain the tricolor delay on biotech.