Sanofi be­lieves it’s still not too late to be­come a top play­er in can­cer drug mar­ket

A lit­tle more than two years ago, Sanofi R&D chief Elias Zer­houni sig­naled the phar­ma gi­ant’s sore dis­ap­point­ment in its can­cer pipeline by ax­ing group leader Tal Zaks and 100 in­ves­ti­ga­tors who failed to de­liv­er the kind of ex­cit­ing new on­col­o­gy pro­grams the phar­ma gi­ant had promised to in­vestors.

At the time, Sanofi said it was re­or­ga­niz­ing to cut back ex­pens­es and ab­sorb­ing the rest of the can­cer R&D group in­to the glob­al re­search struc­ture. Then it turned to Re­gen­eron to go to work on a block­buster PD-1 part­ner­ship, which now is mov­ing di­rect­ly in­to piv­otal stud­ies. And Sanofi, which has strug­gled to find a ma­jor ac­qui­si­tion deal it can com­plete, has been ea­ger­ly sig­nal­ing its in­ten­tion to be­come a play­er in im­muno-on­col­o­gy, cer­tain that the big sur­pris­es of the past year — like Bris­tol-My­ers’ big set­back on first-line lung can­cer — in­di­cate that there’s still plen­ty of tro­phies to hunt in the game of block­busters played by the lead­ers in bio­phar­ma.

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