Dive Brief:
- Sanofi reportedly is planning to cut 600 jobs in France over the next three years, according to Bloomberg.
- Citing French labor union representatives, Bloomberg reports the job cuts could come in the form of voluntary early retirements.
- Sanofi's core diabetes franchise has come under pressure as its top-selling insulin Lantus faces biosimilar competition by year-end.
Dive Insight:
New Sanofi CEO Olivier Brandicourt is attempting to implement a broad reorganization to streamline the large French drugmaker. The company plans to realize $1.8 billion in cost savings by 2018 and has re-organized itself into five new business units as of January 2016. The new units are general medicines and emerging markets, specialty care, diabetes and cardiovascular, Sanofi Pastuer, and the animal-health division Merial.
Earlier this year, Sanofi moved quickly to terminate its struggling partnership with Mannkind to co-develop the inhaleable insulin Afrezza.
Sanofi employs 110,000 workers worldwide, 17,000 of whom are located in the U.S. The company told BioPharma Dive "it will provide an overall update on the new organization" when it reports 2015 annual results on February 9th.
Although under pressure, Sanofi notched a considerable success last year in developing the first vaccine for the dengue virus, dengvaxia.
Sanofi's Pasteur division on Tuesday announced it would pursue the development of a vaccine for the Zika virus, one day after the World Health Organization declared the Zika outbreak a global health emergency. Zika and dengue are spread by the same type of mosquito and share common symptoms. Sanofi believes its experience in developing dengvaxia will assist it to speedily isolate a vaccine candidate for Zika.