Sanofi May Move Rare Disease to Boston Area

French drugmaker Sanofi is planning to deepen the rare diseases footprint of its Genzyme franchise at Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, where according to reports the business could move into new facilities housing about 2,000 employees.

While stressing that nothing has yet been finalized, Sanofi noted that the Greater Boston area is one of its key hubs, where it currently has more than 15 separate offices, labs and manufacturing sites.

Altogether, Genzyme employs some 5,000 people in Massachusetts, including the current staff of its Cambridge headquarters. The plan is to merge some of those dispersed operations at one location, and the newspaper Boston Globe said the company could move some jobs from its Framingham, Massachusetts, manufacturing facility to Cambridge.

Following its $11.6 billion acquisition of the Waltham, Massachusetts-based Biogen spinoff Bioverativ, a hemophilia drug developer, earlier this year, Sanofi has moved the business to new corporate facilities in Boston.

The region is already seeing an influx of fresh pharma investment, with Japanese drugmaker Takeda recently announcing plans to move its US headquarters to the Boston area to be closer to Ireland-domiciled Shire, which it is acquiring for $64 billion.

Shire employs 3,000 people in the region, where its rare disease research and its US commercial operations are concentrated. Last year, Takeda moved as many as 750 employees in R&D and vaccines from Illinois to Cambridge.

According to the pharmaceutical trade journal Fierce Pharma, another French drugmaker, Ipsen, is in the process of moving its US headquarters from New Jersey to Boston, where Philips Healthcare recently relocated its North American base.