The French pharmaceutical company said last week it wants to “launch at least five new phase 3 programs for innovative vaccines by 2025”, notably against bronchiolitis in young children, pneumococcal and yellow fever.
At the same time, the French group, one of the largest producers of vaccines in the world, reaffirmed its objective of achieving annual sales of over 10 billion euros by 2030.
In the field of pediatrics, the last clinical trials for a pneumococcal vaccine are scheduled to take place in the first half of 2024. Vaccines to combat this type of infection represent the “biggest market” in the field, if we exclude those for Covid-19 , emphasizes Jean-François Toussaint, Head of Global Vaccine Research and Development.
In the highly competitive therapeutic segment targeting respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), the cause of bronchiolitis and pneumonia, conditions that claim tens of thousands of lives each year, Sanofi is particularly targeting children between the ages of 1 and 5 .
Given the “very conclusive” initial results of an intranasal vaccine to help them develop their own immune response to RSV, Sanofi plans to “start the phase 3 trial early next year,” Mr. Toussaint said.
According to experts, RSV could be as serious as the flu virus.
A new generation of mRNAs
The group is conducting flu vaccine research, wanting to “improve messenger RNA technology” as it is currently available. According to Mr. Toussaint, this technology provides a strong immune response to the A strain, but an insufficient one to the B strain. Other research laboratories have reached the same conclusion.
“We knew that messenger RNA was not going to be a permanent cure and that we had to work on a second generation. We invested in innovations that would take us a step forward in mRNA technology,” he told AFP.
The necessary changes were clearly identified: “messenger RNA vaccines are frozen, so they can be used in the event of a pandemic, but not against influenza,” he explains, underlining the “substantial progress” of Sanofi’s proposed vaccine, which “can be stable for 12 months at 4°C”.
In addition, “with a routine vaccination like the flu, we can’t stay in bed for one or two days every year” because of side effects, such as those that could occur after a vaccination with RNA messenger against Covid-19, he emphasized.
Sanofi, which tried to develop a Covid-19 vaccine using messenger RNA technology, eventually gave up.
But, after missing the opportunity and falling behind the American laboratories Moderna and Pfizer, or the German Curevac, the giant in the health industry announced in 2021 its intention to accelerate the development of this technology. Sanofi has invested heavily in this area and created a center dedicated to mRNA vaccines.
Following promising results in animals, the group plans to use the technology to launch the first phase of a clinical trial for its therapeutic vaccine candidate against acne, an inflammatory skin disease, in the second half of the year.
Translated by Cornelia Mohora after the article published by France24.
2023-07-03 09:40:34
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