PARIS (Reuters) - Sanofi missed the boat on immune system-boosting cancer drugs. Now it’s trying to catch up.
The French drugmaker has hired John Reed, the former top scientist at oncology market leader Roche to head its group research operations. And it is now focusing on a pipeline of 10 medicines that it hopes will help it get a piece of the $100 billion-a-year cancer drug market.
Dmitri Wiederschain, head of Sanofi’s immuno-oncology research, acknowledged the company had failed to capitalize on the takeoff of immunotherapy - drugs that activate the body’s immune system to attack tumor cells - in the early 2010s.
But he said the group could now gain an edge in the next waves of immunotherapy treatments, which include combining different drugs to better target cancer.
“It is of course a very competitive space but we now have ‘foundation assets’ to form a better rationale for combinations,” he told Reuters in an interview, citing immunotherapy approaches known as PD-1, TGFBeta and the antibody CD38.
“If you look across the biopharmaceutical landscape, Sanofi is the only company which has all three assets in its own pipeline or partnered with Regeneron,” Wiederschain said. Sanofi teamed with U.S firm Regeneron in 2007 to increase its presence in biotech medicine.
Immunotherapy is the fastest-growing part of the cancer drug segment, with sales expected to top $25 billion-a-year by 2021, according to analyst forecasts compiled by Thomson Reuters.
Frederic Ponchon, a manager at Sycomore Asset Management which holds 6.7 million Sanofi shares, said the French company was unlikely to rival cancer leaders like Switzerland’s Roche and U.S. firm Merck & Co
