Sanofi, which last week announced plans to spend more than €6 million on a vaccine plant upgrade in Canada, said it is expanding capacity for vaccines to ensure quality and scale while being able to respond quickly to future pandemics.

The Singapore project, on which construction is expected to begin in the 2021 third quarter, will produce “innovative vaccines on a massive scale for Asia” and enhance Singapore’s position as a regional innovation hub for the healthcare industry, the drugmaker said. The site is expected to be fully operational by Q1 2026. Sanofi noted that the facility is designed to be carbon-neutral and drastically reduce both resource consumption and waste production, in line with its environmental strategy.

Construction plans foresee the complex being designed around a central unit housing several fully digitalized modules that allow production of three to four vaccines simultaneously, compared with only one at its sites currently. The facility will have the flexibility to leverage multiple vaccine manufacturing technology platforms based on different cell types, the drugmaker said, adding that the design’s modularity and flexibility will allow production of a specific vaccine to be prioritized in a faster timeframe, depending on public health needs.

According to the French pharmaceutical major, both new investments are part of its strategy that calls for vaccines to be a key growth driver through differentiated products, market expansion and new launches.

While Sanofi’s plans to manufacture a Covid-19 vaccine in cooperation with UK drugs giant Glaxo SmithKline have stalled, it is working full speed ahead with clinical-stage mRNA therapeutics company Translate Bio of the US to develop multiple vaccines, including one for Covid.  The drugmaker has also pledged to help produce the BioNTech/Pfizer Covid vaccine at its Höchst site in Frankfurt, Germany.

Acquisition of Tidal Therapeutics

Last week, Sanofi announced the acquisition of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Tidal Therapeutics, a privately owned, pre-clinical stage US biotech company, for an upfront payment of $160 million and up to $310 million upon achievement of certain milestones.

The biotech has what the French drugmaker said is a novel mRNA-based approach for in vivo reprogramming of immune cells both immuno-oncology and inflammatory diseases, and may have broad applicability to other disease areas as well.

Author: Dede Williams, Freelance Journalist