Dive Brief:
- Sanofi has signed a lease on a 900,000-square-foot site in Cambridge, Massachusetts, creating a new Boston area hub where 2,700 of its employees will be based, the French drugmaker said Tuesday.
- The corporate move won't create new jobs, but will consolidate a majority of Sanofi's Massachusetts workforce under one roof — or technically two. The pharma plans to build two buildings on the site with an expected open date in 2021, a company spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to BioPharma Dive.
- The company declined to release specifics on the deal, such as the cost or duration of the lease. The new location will be home to roughly 1,000 R&D workers, 1,500 employees in Sanofi-Genzyme's specialty care business unit and 200 corporate or administrative positions.
Dive Insight:
Corporate consolidation is a constant task for big pharmas, who find themselves sprawling out across areas through mergers, acquisitions and growth.
A week ago, Pfizer told BioPharma Dive its Cancer Immunology Unit would relocate from South San Francisco to La Jolla, California, shuffling about 100 jobs in oncology research and development in the process. That move will make Pfizer's La Jolla location one of the largest pharmaceutical research hubs in the San Diego area, with 900 workers.
Over on the East Coast, meanwhile, Sanofi is rejiggering its Massachusetts setup, where it has employees spread out across 10 locations in the Bay State.
As of August, the French pharmaceutical giant was the largest life sciences employer in the state with 4,800 local workers, according to a report from the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council released that month. The new location will be home to slightly more than half of them. Sanofi has roughly 100,000 employees across the globe.
Sanofi bought Genzyme in 2011 with a $20.1 billion cash offer. The biotech, founded in 1981 in the Greater Boston area, has expanded over time from focusing on rare diseases to adding in research on multiple sclerosis, oncology and immunology.
Sanofi is venturing into a new East Cambridge development dubbed Cambridge Crossing. The 45-acre mixed-use spot is roughly a mile northeast of Kendall Square. Sanofi will be a founding tenant of the development along with Philips Healthcare.