While spec­u­la­tion that Sanofi is con­sid­er­ing op­tions for its con­sumer health­care unit erupts ahead of a planned strate­gic up­date next month, it looks like the French drug­mak­er is los­ing a se­nior ex­ec­u­tive in charge of strat­e­gy.

Al­ban de La Sabliere

Muza­m­mil Mansuri, ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of strat­e­gy, and busi­ness de­vel­op­ment — and mem­ber of Sanofi’s ex­ec­u­tive com­mit­tee — is set to leave the com­pa­ny by the end of No­vem­ber, Reuters re­port­ed on Fri­day, cit­ing an in­ter­nal memo.

A Sanofi spokesper­son con­firmed the de­par­ture.

Mansuri, as planned, has de­cid­ed to re­tire at the end of the month af­ter play­ing a key role in re­shap­ing the com­pa­ny’s strat­e­gy, over­see­ing ac­qui­si­tions and struc­tur­ing part­ner­ships and al­liances, the spokesper­son told End­points News.

Mansuri start­ed out as a re­search sci­en­tist at the en­er­gy com­pa­ny Shell be­fore mov­ing to Bris­tol-My­ers. His last role pri­or to join­ing Sanofi in 2016 was se­nior VP of R&D strat­e­gy and cor­po­rate de­vel­op­ment at Gilead Sci­ences.

Al­ban de La Sabliere, cur­rent­ly Sanofi’s head of busi­ness de­vel­op­ment, and Lau­rent van Ler­berghe, head of strat­e­gy, will ex­pand their roles to take on al­liance man­age­ment, com­pet­i­tive in­tel­li­gence, and Sanofi Ven­tures as well as port­fo­lio an­a­lyt­ics and cor­po­rate strat­e­gy, re­spec­tive­ly, the spokesper­son said.

Lau­rent van Ler­berghe

New­ly crowned chief ex­ec­u­tive Paul Hud­son, who took charge of Sanofi on Sep­tem­ber 1, is set to ad­dress in­vestors and of­fer a ‘strate­gic up­date’ for a cap­i­tal mar­kets day in Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts on De­cem­ber 10. In prepa­ra­tion for the event, all of Sanofi’s busi­ness­es are un­der­go­ing a thor­ough re­view.

Hud­son, who suc­ceed­ed Olivi­er Brandi­court, in­her­it­ed a com­pa­ny with a slip­ping stock price, a di­a­betes arm large­ly in de­cline due to US pric­ing pres­sures, and an R&D de­part­ment that lags be­hind its com­pa­tri­ots, par­tic­u­lar­ly af­ter some key hic­cups in on­col­o­gy. In an in­ter­view with a gag­gle of jour­nal­ists last month, he hint­ed that the com­pa­ny is work­ing on jazz­ing up its prospects in can­cer and ex­pand­ing its reach in Chi­na, ex­pect­ing 30 drug launch­es in the re­gion by 2025.

J&J has zeroed in on a Covid-19 vaccine candidate that it hopes to begin testing in humans by September this year — with the extraordinary goal of getting it ready for emergency use in early 2021. And together with BARDA, it’s committing $1 billion to make it happen.

That kind of accelerated timeline would fall on the fast side of NIAID director Anthony Fauci’s well-publicized prediction that it would be another 12 to 18 months before a vaccine can be available for public use. A Phase I trial of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine began two weeks ago, and both the biotech and fellow mRNA player CureVac have discussed similar, if not even faster, timelines for emergency use among healthcare workers.

Using lab-grown proteins that are engineered to mimic the architecture of viruses to induce an immune response, VBI Vaccines is joining the hunt for a coronavirus vaccine — harnessing technology that has initially been proved safe in early trials as a prophylactic for cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection.

Unlike the raft of the companies in the Covid-19 vaccine race — including Moderna, CureVac and J&J — VBI is taking a pan-coronavirus approach, by developing a vaccine that will encompass Covid-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).

VCs love few things more than a proven executive team when it comes to launching a new company. And now a group of A-listers has turned to a pair of top execs out of AveXis to steer the latest gene therapy player into the clinic.

The biotech is Waltham, MA-based Affinia and the two execs are Sean Nolan and Rick Modi — the former CEO and CBO respectively of AveXis, the gene therapy pioneer that fetched $8.7 billion in a sale to Novartis. Nolan has now taken the chairman’s role at Affinia while Modi moves up to the CEO post at the company.

When Pieter van der Meer started raising the capital for Gilde Healthcare’s fifth fund in the waning months of 2019, he had his eyes on a different chain of events that could change the healthcare system and perhaps even play to his firm’s advantage: The US presidential election.

Since raising their third fund in 2011, the 34-year-old Dutch firm had focused on value-based care. They chose late-stage biotechs that came up with new devices and delivery systems for de-risked established compounds, and when they chose preclinical biotechs, they spoke with potential pharma partners, payers and regulators to ask where and at what prices the drug made sense. As the Democratic primary became a contest over how to lower healthcare costs, it looked like a strategy that could pay off.