In­side the deal: Sanofi flipped from sell-off to merg­er in lead up to $3.2B Trans­late buy­out

Pri­or to its $3.2 bil­lion ac­qui­si­tion of mR­NA play­er Trans­late Bio ear­li­er this month, French drug­mak­er Sanofi con­sid­ered dump­ing a quar­ter of its shares in the firm be­fore ul­ti­mate­ly flip­ping the script and buy­ing the biotech out­right at a pre­mi­um.

That’s the sto­ry from an in­side look at how the buy­out ne­go­ti­a­tions played out from a Trans­late fil­ing with the SEC post­ed on­line Mon­day.

In April, Sanofi reached out to Trans­late to ex­press its in­ter­est in sell­ing off around 25% of its shares in the com­pa­ny, which it had been work­ing with since 2018. Un­der CEO Paul Hud­son, who joined the team in mid-2019, Sanofi ex­pand­ed that col­lab­o­ra­tion as part of his am­bi­tious goal to cen­ter the drug­mak­er’s next-gen cell ther­a­py and vac­cines busi­ness around mR­NA

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