Sanofi announced on Tuesday, August 3, the acquisition of the American biotech Translate Bio, a specialist in messenger RNA-based therapies and vaccines. The French pharmaceutical giant is thus putting its hand ...

Takeover of Translate Bio by Sanofi: "The Covid crisis has totally changed the situation"

Logo at Sanofi headquarters, in Paris, in March 2020. AFP - FRANCK FIFE

Text by: Louis Augry

6 mins

Sanofi announced on Tuesday, August 3, the acquisition of the American biotech Translate Bio, a specialist in messenger RNA-based therapies and vaccines.

The French pharmaceutical giant is thus getting its hands on a technology whose effectiveness has been proven by anti-Covid vaccines.

Interview with Mathieu Guerriaud, lecturer in pharmaceutical law at the University of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté.

Publicity

By purchasing the American TranslateBio, Sanofi is positioning itself in messenger RNA, a technology that represents a significant market, thanks in particular to the rise of anti-Covid vaccines.

The company is deploying great resources for this.

Already at the end of June, the French giant announced that it wanted to

invest heavily in messenger RNA

more than 2 billion euros by 2025 with the creation of two research centers.

Its objective is to develop several vaccines targeting infectious diseases.

► To read also: Covid-19: messenger RNA vaccines would prevent contamination

On the Covid-19 front, the French laboratory has already fallen far behind in the vaccine race, attracting criticism from political leaders. A delay that the company puts into perspective, believing that it is just behind, in the second car. Sanofi should market its first anti-Covid vaccine by the end of the year in collaboration with the British GSK. At the same time, the group is developing a second vaccine, this time based on messenger RNA technology in partnership with the American Translate Bio.

RFI

: Sanofi today decides to acquire Translate Bio for $ 3.2 billion.
A few weeks ago, he announced to invest 2 billion euros by 2025 in this technology with the creation in particular of a specialized research center.
How do you explain this shift towards messenger RNA
?

Mathieu Guerriaud:

I do not know if this is a shift… Sanofi had already been interested in messenger RNA in the past, but had not chosen this option. Today, he is coming back to it, because other laboratories have proven that it works and that it has enormous benefits. We were already talking about messenger RNA, but the Covid crisis has completely changed the situation. If we look at the course of history, it is always in times of crisis that we advance the fastest, because we need things to go quickly. And that's what happened with messenger RNA during the coronavirus crisis. Governments have invested a lot of money to help research, we have been able to conduct clinical trials on tens of thousands of patients. All of this allowed us to quickly gain an extremely reliable view of the efficacy of this product.

We know that messenger RNA is used by Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna laboratories against Covid, does this acquisition of Translate Bio also aim to make up for the delay taken by Sanofi in the vaccine race?

Pfizer partnered with BioNtech

to develop its vaccine and it was a gamble. Moderna's situation is different because messenger RNA has been their core business from the start. But it is only logical that Sanofi is looking to buy competent companies in the field. The pharmaceutical industry has been outsourcing its research and development for years. This notion of merger / acquisition is really a classic in this industry. The idea is certainly to catch up, yes, but the company has plenty of capacity. And I think they want to go beyond this catching up, beyond the coronavirus crisis.

Indeed, the CEO of Sanofi said he wanted to "

release the potential of messenger RNA

for other areas. For what type of diseases can this technology prove useful in the long term
?

With this technology, we are able to make the body produce its own drugs. From a scientific and technological standpoint, it is wonderful. It could help to cope with "civilizing" diseases like diabetes, or even much more serious things like autoimmune diseases. I think it will revolutionize vaccines, old technologies are less effective and take a long time. It takes six months to produce a "normal" vaccine, when viruses are cultured. With messenger RNA, it takes a month or two. And above all, it is extremely practical because you just have to change the RNA code, which makes it possible to easily react to variants, for example. The whole field of possibilities is before us because it is a very flexible technology and adaptable.

Takeover of Translate Bio by Sanofi: "The Covid crisis has totally changed the situation"

Takeover of Translate Bio by Sanofi: "The Covid crisis has totally changed the situation"

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