French drugmaker Sanofi and private equity investor Advent International have agreed a deal under which Advent will acquire Sanofi's European generics business Zentiva for €1.9 billion. Negotiations between the two companies were initiated in April of this year.

With a broad generics portfolio covering a variety of therapeutic areas, Prague-headquartered Zentiva is focused on three European generics market areas — pharmacy, physician and wholesaler. The company, which claims to reach more than 40 million patients in 25 European countries, operates flexible manufacturing facilities in Prague and Bucharest.

The two parties said the signing of the Share Purchase Agreement marks a key step toward the closing of the deal in this year’s fourth quarter of 2018, subject to the approval of regulatory authorities.

China R&D hub opened

In other news, Sanofi has opened a new R&D operations hub in China, the third pillar of Sanofi Global, joining facilities in France and the US. With an investment of €66 million, the French player said the hub will support the clinical research and development of its innovative drugs by focusing on the management of global multi-center clinical trials data and files.

Bringing together global data and analysis, the hub is expected to accelerate the availability of trial results, from Phase I to Phase IV, while at the same time taking advantage of local talents to further strengthen its digital capabilities. Plans call for recruiting 300 local pharmaceutical research and development professionals by 2020.

The Chengdu hub will target diseases that affect millions of people across Sanofi’s therapeutic areas of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, vaccines, oncology, immunology and inflammation, rare diseases, multiple sclerosis and neurology. It will also leverage global “cutting-edge biological technology” for polypeptides, gene therapy, monoclonal antibodies and multi-specific antibodies, Sanofi said.