Paul Hud­son promis­es a bright new fu­ture at Sanofi, kick­ing loose me-too drugs and fo­cus­ing on land­mark ad­vances. But can he de­liv­er?

Paul Hud­son was on a mis­sion Tues­day morn­ing as he stood up to ad­dress Sanofi’s new R&D and busi­ness strat­e­gy.

Still fresh in­to the job, the new CEO set out to con­vince his au­di­ence — in­clud­ing the le­gions of ner­vous staffers in­evitably de­vot­ing much of their day to lis­ten­ing in — that the phar­ma gi­ant is shed­ding the lay­ers of bu­reau­cra­cy that had held them back from mak­ing progress in the past, drop­ping the duds in the pipeline and repri­or­i­tiz­ing a more nar­row set of ex­per­i­men­tal drugs that were promised as first-in-class or best-in-class.  The com­pa­ny, he added, is now po­si­tioned to “go af­ter oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ties” that could of­fer a trans­for­ma­tion­al ap­proach to treat­ing its core dis­eases.

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