April 19, 2016
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
PARIS – To expand its manufacturing and commercial capabilities, French-based Sanofi will spend $339 million to expand its operations in Geel, Belgium, which is used to make the company’s treatments for rare diseases.
Sanofi said the investment will allow the company to expand existing production capabilities to support its pipeline of rare disease treatments, a market that the company believes it maintains a competitive position. It’s also a market that Sanofi has been rumored to be willing to plunk down $20 million for possible acquisitions of companies such as San Rafael, Calif.-based BioMarin Pharmaceuticals , Carlsbad, Calif.-based Ionis Pharmaceuticals (formerly Isis Pharmaceuticals), and Novato, Calif.-based Ultragenyx .
Updates to the facility will include new laboratories focused on quality control and manufacturing sciences, Sanofi said in a statement. The investment will allow the site to expand by approximately 262,000 square feet of manufacturing floor space. The company said the additional space will allow it to expand its production capabilities, as well as diversity production abilities to include other therapeutic areas. The expansion will allow Sanofi to hire more employees for the site to support operations. Sanofi did not specify a targeted number of new hires in its announcement. The additional $339 million investment is on top of a $680 million investment made to the same site, which has been in operation since 2001.
The Geel site is used in the production of protein therapy for Pompe disease, a rare, genetic muscular disease that is often fatal. The protein therapy is produced using cell cultures in large bioreactors, followed by a purification process.
“This investment not only strengthens our goal of becoming a leader in biologics but represents our focus on patients’ needs,” Philippe Luscan, executive vice president of global industrial affairs and president of Sanofi in France, said in a statement. “We have a robust development pipeline of biological molecules, including monoclonal antibodies, and this investment furthers our work and expertise in key disease areas such as cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and atopic dermatitis.
While Sanofi is making investments in the Geel site, the company is also looking at ways to reign in some costs, with an aim of slashing $1.63 billion in costs over the next five years. But those cost cutting measures are not getting in the way of long-term expansions, such as in Geel, or the expansion of Sanofi Genzyme ’s administrative operations in Westborough, Mass. Genzyme is the company’s rare-disease subsidiary. The company is adding another 53,879 square feet of space with the addition of another 300 staffers. Genzyme, which had abandoned cancer research, has folded some cancer research back into its operations.
Sanofi said it intends to launch several biologics over the next few years, pairing technology, cutting-edge manufacturing and operations capabilities to deliver high-quality products that could improve patient outcomes. Recently Sanofi deepened its push into immuno-oncology therapeutics by striking two deals worth a combined $1.2 billion with Innate Pharma and startup Warp Drive Bio.
Sanofi’s two deals are thrusting the company into the middle of the white-hot field of immuno-oncology. Immuno-oncology is a therapy field exploding with potential for developing treatments for cancer by harnessing the body’s own immune system to fight cancer infections. The idea of immune-oncology has been around for years, with one drug, Proleukin having been shown to be quite effective, although with several side effects. Sanofi will be going head to head against other companies that have a firm toehold in the immuno-oncology field, particularly London-based AstraZeneca , which spent much of 2015 striking deals to bolster its own immuno-oncology pipeline.
