Sanofi And Joslin Team Up On Diabetes Discovery

Sanofi continues to look for new, innovative ways to diversify its diabetes portfolio; its latest endeavor is a discovery collaboration with Harvard Medical School’s Joslin Diabetes Center.

In an effort to continue its dominance in the diabetes field, Sanofi has teamed up with Joslin Diabetes Center, a research arm of Harvard Medical School, to discover new biologics and small molecule drugs for the treatment of diabetes.

The collaboration is expected to begin mid-summer and is currently set to last three years with the option for an extension – Sanofi VP of external innovation Sridar Nateson said that the French pharma intends to extend the contract at that time in an even bigger collaboration. The company would not reveal the current level of funding that it will be providing to Joslin.

“As a pharmaceutical company, as with other large pharma companies, we are facing significant issues in our productivity,” he said. “Sanofi is very committed to supporting innovation in the translational area where we can help bring medicines from academic labs to patients.”

Sanofi and Joslin will be working to develop compounds that can treat both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. The work will focus on four areas. The first area is treatments for diabetes complications, specifically nephropathy. Researchers will also be looking into tissue-specific insulin – the first being liver-specific. The next area of focus for the collaboration will be insulin sensitivity; Joslin already has targets that could address this issue. Other projects will delve into personalized medicine for diabetes, using Joslin’s significant efforts in genomics to try to pinpoint why certain patients develop complications when others do not and why other patients development them at different times.

“There are initial areas and defined targets that we are looking at, but we are not confining ourselves to those areas,” said Nandan Padukone, VP of Joslin’s Office of Commercialization and Ventures. The office was set up almost two years ago to help create external partnerships between Joslin and pharmaceutical companies.

Early research is expected to take place at Joslin and work will be turned over to Sanofi once it gets closer to clinical development. Sanofi has first right of refusal on anything that Joslin discovers under the agreement, but Joslin has the right to seek another partner should Sanofi not pursue that option.

The collaboration will marry the strengths of both, bringing together Joslin’s expertise in the biology of the disease with Sanofi’s clinical trial and commercialization experience, said Padukone

Intellectual property resulting from the collaboration will be shared between the two entities. A joint steering committee comprised of members from both organizations will evaluate the progress of the program. Joslin will also have full publishing rights. The academic center is encouraged by Sanofi to publish at its discretion, said Padukone.

The tie-up with Joslin is similar to other efforts Sanofi has made to partner with academia – choosing to make smaller deals with individual centers, rather than taking the route of funding larger centers of innovation like competitors Pfizer Inc., Merck & Co. Inc., and Bayer AG(See (Also see "Merck Ups The Calibr Of Academic-Industry Cooperation" - Pink Sheet, 15 Mar, 2012.) and (Also see "Pfizer Teams With Eight Boston-Area Research Institutions In $100MM Tie-Up" - Pink Sheet, 8 Jun, 2011.). In the past, Sanofi has struck discovery deals with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the California Institute of Technology. The French pharma began actively engaging academic institutions in 2009; acknowledging that many of these collaborations would take years to come to fruition (Also see "Back To School: Big Pharmas Test New Models For Tapping Academia " - In Vivo, 1 Feb, 2011.).