December 3, 2014
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Hamburg, Germany-based Evotec AG announced yesterday that it has entered into a complex alliance deal with Paris-based Sanofi which will include pipeline-building with a focus on oncology, outsourcing built around acquisition of Sanofi’s drug discovery operations in Toulouse, and combining their libraries.
The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2015. Sanofi plans to spend $310 million over five years on future research programs located in southern France.
“We are very proud that Sanofi has chosen Evotec for this significant alliance,” said Evotec CEO Werner Lanthaler in a statement. “This collaboration is a major milestone in the drug discovery space and accelerates Evotec’s strategy to become the leading drug discovery partner to the Pharma and biotech industry as well as academia. We will warmly welcome the Sanofi employees to the Evotec Group and look forward to working with them.”
In the oncology pipeline area Evotec will generally focus on drug discovery to reach pre-clinical development. At that point Sanofi will usually pick up the compound for development and commercialization. Evotec plans to license five Sanofi portfolio projects that are already advanced pre-clinical projects, as well as other projects.
Evotec also plans to expand its Cure X/Target X business model. This approach creates a network of academic researchers and institutions combined with the company’s areas of expertise.
In the Toulouse facilities, Evotec plans to expand its complement of 650 scientists with an additional 200 from the Sanofi research site. This is expected to focus on early-stage discovery and pre-clinical processes.
Of greater interest is the third component, the combining of the two companies’ compound libraries. The Sanofi library, at its Toulouse site, has more than 1 million compounds. Evotec’s own library has more than 400,000 compounds. Under the terms of the agreement Evotec will screen the libraries against collaborators’ and partners’ targets, with Sanofi receiving payments if a product is discovered and developed.
“Open innovation is a key driver of Sanofi’s strategy,” said Elias Zerhouni, president of global research and development for Sanofi in a statement. “We believe Evotec will be an ideal partner, a company that fits our quality expectations and our strategic vision. Our collaboration will secure the future for our employees in Toulouse and importantly accelerate our pipeline productivity.”
Sanofi has been on a roll recently, announcing in November that it had plans to launch up to 18 new drugs between 2014 and 2020. It also recently fired its chief executive, Christian Viehbacher, in late October.
At least some analysts suggest that the deal with the Germany-based Evotec is partly to calm investor concerns that Sanofi is too dependent on France and that part of the reason they fired Viehbacher was that he was German-Canadian. About half of Sanofi’s research staff is French, but France only accounts for about 8 percent of its revenue.
